Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

by Daniel Kahneman

Interviews are also a minefield of psychological biases. In recent years, people have become well aware that interviewers tend, often unintentionally, to favor candidates who are culturally similar to them or with whom they have something in common, including gender, race, and educational background. Many companies now recognize the risks posed by biases and try to address them through specific training of recruiting professionals and other employees. Other biases have also been known for decades. For instance, physical appearance plays a large part in the evaluation of candidates, even for positions where it should matter little or not at all. Such biases are shared by all or most recruiters and, when applied to a given candidate, will thus tend to produce a shared error—a negative or positive bias in the candidate’s evaluation.