7 cognitive biases that affect the success of your interview

In a salary negotiation, for instance, whoever makes the first offer establishes a range of reasonable possibilities in each person’s mind.

Any counteroffer will naturally be anchored by that opening offer.

When people overestimate the importance of information that is easy to remember.

In one experiment, a professor asked students to list either two or 10 ways to improve his class. Students that had to come up with 10 ways gave the class much higher ratings, likely because they had a harder time thinking about what was wrong with the class.

This phenomenon could easily apply in the case of job interviews. If you have a hard time recalling what a candidate did wrong during an interview, you’ll likely rate him higher than if you can recall those things easily.

Failing to recognize your cognitive biases is a bias in itself.

Notably, Princeton psychologist Emily Pronin has found that “individuals see the existence and operation of cognitive and motivational biases much more in others than in themselves.”

People with a high blind-spot bias are least likely to learn from de-biasing training and to listen to expert advice when making decisions.

We tend to listen only to the information that confirms our preconceptions. Once you’ve formed an initial opinion about someone, it’s hard to change your mind.

For example, researchers had participants watch a video of a student taking an academic test. Some participants were told that the student came from a high socioeconomic background; others were told the student came from a low socioeconomic background. Those in the first condition believed the student’s performance was above grade level, while those in the second condition believed the student’s performance was below.

If you know some information about a candidate’s background, you might be inclined to use that information to make false judgments about his or her ability.

Our tendency to focus on the most easily recognizable features of a person or concept.

For example, research suggests that when there’s only one member of a racial minority on a business team, other members use that individual’s performance to predict how any member of that racial group would perform.

Expecting a group or person to have certain qualities without having real information about the individual.

There may be some value to stereotyping because it allows us to quickly identify strangers as friends or enemies. But people tend to overuse it. For example, one study found that people were more likely to hire a hypothetical male candidate over a female candidate to perform a mathematical task, even when they learned that the candidates would perform equally well.

This article is published in collaboration with Business Insider. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Shana Lebowitz is a strategy reporter for Business Insider. Drake Baere is the ideas editor at Tech Insider.

Image: Unemployed Belgian Mohamed Sammar (R) answers questions during a simulated job interview, which is recorded to help him get feedback afterwards in Brussels. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir