Using this paradigm we were able to analyze both the nature of speakers' beliefs and their effects on communication. In these studies, participants rated their own expertise on a 11-point scale and then assessed either the likelihood that another student at the same university will know the name of the object or the proportion of students who would know the name. People's judgments are biased in the direction of their own knowledge. In each of the studies described above, we found significant differences between estimates by individuals who did and did not know the name of the object, landscape, or celebrity. That is, judges seem prone to what Ross terms false consensus bias - they assume that others are more similar to themselves than they actually are.
People take the target's social category memberships into account when making knowledge judgments.
Not only can judges assess general levels of knowledge in a population but they are also fairly good at assessing differences in expertise associated with sub-group memberships. Fussell et al. These results suggest that judges possess schematic representations of others' knowledge that they use in addition to their own level of expertise when judging others' knowledge. Note that the latter, within-addressee line of investigation was not possible using the original referential communication task. Such differences also indicate that perspective-taking occurs on a message by message basis.