A zero-acquaintance situation requires a perceiver to make a judgment about a target with whom the perceiver has had no prior social interaction. These judgments can be made using a variety of cues, including brief interactions with the target, video recordings of the target, photographs of the target, and observations of the target's personal environments, among others. In zero-acquaintance studies, the target's actual personality is determined through the target's self-rating and/or ratings from close acquaintance(s) of that target. Consensus in ratings is determined by how consistently perceivers rate the target's personality when compared to other raters. Accuracy in ratings is determined by how well perceivers' ratings of a target compare to that target's self-ratings on the same scale, or to that target's close acquaintances' ratings of the target. Zero-acquaintance judgments are regularly made in day-to-day life. Given that these judgments tend to remain stable, even as the length of interaction increases, they can influence important interpersonal outcomes.
Background
History The study of zero-acquaintance personality judgments developed from Cleeton and Knight's (1924) intent to demonstrate the futility of using physical criteria to predict unobservable individual traits. In order to accomplish this, Cleeton and Knight (1924) recruited 30 target participants from national fraternities and sororities, so that a large group of close acquaintances from these organizations could rate eight traits (i.e. individual traits included sound judgment, intellectual capacity, frankness, willpower, ability to make friends, leadership, originality, and impulsiveness) of the target participants. Cleeton and Knight (1924) then asked a group of strangers to rate these eight traits of each target participant after viewing the target participant from a distance for only a few minutes. After measuring several objective physical traits of the target participants, such as cranium size and eye width, Cleeton and Knight (1924) found that these physical traits were unrelated to close acquaintances' ratings of unobservable individual traits. However, they found that strangers' rating of an unfamiliar individual's traits were reliable; strangers tended to rate a target's personality similarly. Although these ratings were inaccurate, it became apparent that raters must be using similar indicators to make judgements about individual traits. Passini and Norman (1966) found comparable evidence that strangers provide similar ratings of unobservable personality traits of a target participant with no prior acquaintanceship. In an introductory undergraduate psychology course, students with no previous interactions were placed into groups and asked to complete personality ratings for each member in the group. Given that the strangers tended to rate a target participant's personality similarly, Passini and Norman (1966) posited that some common observable characteristics must be informing these judgements. In the same year, Taft (1966) demonstrated that strangers can make judgments of personality more accurately than chance, but not as accurately as close acquaintances. These findings went unnoticed for over twenty years, until Albright, Kenny, and Malloy (1988) revived interest and formally coined the term zero-acquaintance personality judgments. These researchers established that certain physical appearance variables, including attractiveness, type of dress (both formal and neatness), and perceived age, informed strangers' zero-acquaintance personality judgments. Ratings between strangers were most similar to each other and to the target's self-rating for the traits "sociable" and "responsible". Ratings of target attractiveness informed judgements of sociability; formality and neatness of dress informed judgements of responsibility.
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