Judging who, or what, judges people best

This week’s Gestalt Which-of-These-Alternatives-Do-You-See? Question asks you to look at a newly published study.

The question is: What, exactly, is this study judging?

The study is “Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans“, Wu Youyou, Michal Kosinski [pictured here], and David Stillwell, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, epub January 12, 2015. The authors are at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Stanford University in California.

What is being judged? The choices are:

1. The good judgment of certain computer programs
2. The bad judgment of many human beings
3. Something else

BONUS: Video of Monty Python‘s Argument Sketch performed with two vintage speech synthesizers:

BONUS: Video of Monty Python’s Argument Sketch performed with Monty Pythons: