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USING slang can make you look stupid and talking loudly can make you seem smart. That鈥檚 the conclusion of Canadian researchers who have measured people鈥檚 ability to judge IQ by the way others look and talk.

Psychologists have long been interested in how we judge intelligence in strangers. For example, studies in the 1920s and 1930s showed that people were largely unable to gauge IQ from photographs. Now Robert Gifford and D鈥橝rcy Reynolds at the University of Victoria in British Columbia have tried to discover exactly which cues help people to judge IQ accurately, and which cause them to get it wrong.

To carry out the tests, Gifford and Reynolds videotaped high school students answering thought-provoking questions such as: 鈥淲hat do you see as the future of the world鈥檚 environment?鈥� They then showed the videos to groups of 鈥渏udges鈥� who were asked to assess the students鈥� body type and monitor a variety of behavioural cues, such as their fluency, the number of words they used and how loudly they spoke. The judges were then asked to rate the students鈥� intelligence. Each student was also required to sit a standard IQ test.

It turned out that certain cues matched the results of the IQ tests much more closely than others. If a student spoke quickly, was easy to understand or used a lot of words, the judges tended to rate their intelligence highly鈥攁 rating reflected in the results of the independent IQ tests.

Other cues seemed to give the judges an entirely false impression of intelligence as measured by the IQ test, however. Among the cues that led judges to assess students as dull were factors such as using halting speech or slang, saying 鈥渦m鈥� and being fat. Cues that led judges to view students as smart included talking loudly and using proper English. None of these traits correlated with measured IQ.

The group also found that judges formed a more accurate opinion of their subjects by ignoring visual cues. The judges who watched the videotapes were poor at guessing the subject鈥檚 true IQ level, while judges who only listened to the interview, without seeing the subject on video, had a higher success rate.

Gifford says there is a moral for smart people: 鈥淚f you want to do well in a job interview, you might consider doing it over the phone.鈥�

Gifford is due to speak about social evaluation at the annual meeting of the Society for Interpersonal Research and Theory in Montreal in May. 鈥淕ifford鈥檚 work goes beyond simple social psychology to evaluate what relationship our judgements have to what is objectively going on,鈥� says Ray Cooksey, who looks at similar questions at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia.