Smarter people are, on average, better at recognizing intelligence in others though emotional awareness plays a role as well
The core finding: some people are just better at reading intelligence in others. 198 participants rated the intelligence of 50 targets from 1-minute video clips. Overall, people were above-chance accurate but accuracy varied significantly across judges, confirming the "good judge" effect is real
The 3 most important factor were:
IQ (r = 0.21)
Better emotion perception ability — recognizing facial expressions (r = 0.19)
Higher life satisfaction / subjective well-being (r = 0.23)
Gender, empathy, openness, social curiosity, and task enjoyment did not significantly predict accuracy. The two valid behavioral cues for intelligence were articulation and speech content and better judges relied more heavily on exactly those two cues
The intelligence finding is somewhat consistent with the DK effect — you need the ability yourself to recognize it in others
Caveats worth mentioning to preempt criticism:
Reliability of individual slope estimates was modest (~0.42), so individual differences were real but noisy
Sample was mostly German university students, limiting generalizability