1. www.giselajonsson.se
Gisela Jönsson
Exam paper for Theories in social psychology, HT 2011
Stockholm University
THE IMPLICATIONS OF IMPLICIT SOCIAL
COGNITION FOR EMPLOYEE SELECTION: A
REVIEW
Background In Sweden, a typical recruiting process starts
maybe with a notice for the job posted on a
Employee selection is an area of job board or corporate homepage, or just by
organizational activity that, like much of asking around for someone suitable, often
organizational research, is often said to have a without even drafting a thorough profile for
big gap between what science knows and the job. Second comes the first selection,
practitioners do (Nowicki & Rosse, 2002). It based on CV:s and letters, an instrument of
has even been described as the “greatest which the validity is not as thoroughly
failure of I-O psychology” that we have not researched as for example the interview
been able to convince employers to use the (Bright & Hutton, 2000).
decision aids, such as tests & structured
interviews, that research has shown reduce After this there is typically interviews of the
error in prediction of employee performance unstructured, low validity kind (Huffcutt &
(Highhouse, 2008). Arthur, 1994), and there may be a decision,
based mainly on gut feeling.1
1This description I admit is based mainly on my personal experience working as a recruiting assistant, on
coursework in employee selection from the master’s program in Personnel, Work and Organization that I am
currently undertaking, as well as discussions with many friends working in recruiting after having finished our
degree’s from the candidate program in Personnel, Work and Organization and yet other friends having applied to
various jobs, mostly as entry level professionals or just above.
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Now, the science of recruiting and selection important aspects of the job. If extraversion is
gives a different idea of how recruiting should evaluated through informal interview and
be done in order to achieve the best prediction general mental ability (GMA) through a pen-
of future performance. Much of it centers and-paper test, they will consider extraversion
around three different types of testing: tests of more important. But, when presented with the
general mental ability, of personality, and opposite situation, so that GMA was assessed
integrity tests to try and protect against with unstructured interview and extraversion
counter-productive work behaviors (Nowicki with a test, GMA was considered the more
& Rosse, 2002). Also, theoretically, it is better important competency (Highhouse, 2008).
to use the most valid instruments early in the
process, such as these tests, to make sure that As much employee selection research focuses
a bigger share of those candidates left are of on tests, it seems to draw mostly from
the “good enough” kind (so that it matters psychometrics, and personality psychology
less if you use methods with low validity after for the relevance of the personality tests.
that). It is also quite clear from the literature
that structured interviews have superior In this paper I will focus instead on how
validity compared to more informal lessons from social psychology, more
interviews, and that with a properly structured specifically implicit social cognition, can
interview you can reach the validity of mental inform the science of recruiting & selection,
ability tests (Huffcutt & Arthur, 1994). and discuss implications both for recruiters
and candidates. Implicit social cognition is of
Proponents of evidence based recruiting are course highly relevant for intuitive decision
also more fond of tests generally than making about other people, which is what
Swedish managers seem to be, especially tests happens when using unstructured interviews.
of general mental ability which is generally
touted as having the highest predictive power The research question is thus: how
(see for example Hunter & Hunter, 1984). can implicit social cognition inform
Among American managers, 28 % of employee selection practices and
companies responding to a survey by the recommendations?
American Management Association reported
using some kind of cognitive ability test, and Implicit social cognition & the application
19 % used some kind of personality
measurement (Huffcut & Arthur, 1994). The job application, of which the focus will
Swedish numbers have been more difficult to generally be the résumé, is usually the first
come by. A survey by Swedish test company point of contact between applicant and the
Cut-e report 70 % of 424 companies do use organization. The goal of the applicant is to
some kind of test in some of their selections, make a good enough impression, be short-
but of these only 19 % use tests even when listed and called back for the next step in the
selecting regular workers (Jakobsson, 2011). selection process, often the interview(s).
One study found that managers’ preferences Not surprisingly, having an educational
for the unstructured interview is so strong that background and job experience that is
it will warp even what they consider perceived as relevant to the job at hand
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increases a candidate’s chance to be short- important when the female applicant had
listed (Bright & Hutton, 2000). Including them. Interestingly, the applicants were not
positive competency statements about stereotyped; women and men were seen as
yourself (such as “I am a good equally “educated” or “streetwise” for
communicator”) has also been shown to example. What changed was criteria for being
improve chances, though the mechanism is competent, so that it was tailored to the
not entirely clear. Including competency gender that was “supposed” to fill the role.
statements was correlated with higher ratings This shows that what it means to be
on form factors such as layout & design of the competent for a job is not necessarily
résumé as well, suggesting they contribute to something objective.
a kind of overall positive impression of the
résumé (ibid). Simply claiming some positive In the described cases, being a competent
things about yourself, even without backing police chief means being a man first, and
them up with some kind of proof, seems to whatever that man is perceived to be second.
increase your chances of going further in the Interestingly, Uhlmann & Cohen also mention
selection process. that perceiving one’s judgment as bias free
predicted greater gender bias. It is as if the
Candidates with female or foreign names are participants’ brains have already laid down
at a disadvantage at this point of the process, the rules, implicitly, and their conscious
which has been shown many times with both selves then deem it perfectly rational to pick
experimental and field studies (Marlowe, the man as most competent as he clearly fills
Schneider & Nelson, 1996; Bursell, 2007). As the criteria better -- criteria that were
for exposing implicit bias, I find a series of determined in an instant by their sexist brains
studies by Uhlmann & Cohen (2005) to be without them being aware of it. I suppose it
especially enlightening. In one study they makes sense in the way that the more implicit
show that when judging applicants for a and automatic a bias is, the less aware a
traditionally male job (police chief), person will be of having any bias and the
participants judge the importance of different more convinced that they are being objective.
criteria for the job differently, depending on
whether the male/female applicant fulfills Luckily, Uhlmann & Cohen (2005) also found
them or not. That is: if the male applicant is a cure for this particular discrimination. By
described as educated (rather than streetwise), making managers commit to the criteria for
then education is judged as being important. the job before knowing the gender of the
If the man is not educated, then education is applicant, the effect disappeared. For non-
judged as less important. commited managers, the same effect as
previously described was replicated.
Even traditionally feminine traits, such as
being family oriented, were deemed more The detrimental effect of having the wrong
important when possessed by the male name mentioned above might be helped by
applicant. The reverse effect was seen when anonymizing applications, but in reality I
tested for a more feminine but similar status think this is not going to be a very common
job, as women’s studies professor. There practice. For example, hiring through social
different traits were deemed as more media channels will probably only become
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more frequent and there the whole point is to an observer’s attribution of someones
not be anonymous but rather “be a brand”. If I behavior is disturbed when the observer is
want employers to be able to google me and cognitively busy (Gilbert, Pelham & Krull,
find out things about me that I want them to 1988). What Gilbert et al. showed was that
know, I can’t at the same time be anonymous. when doing only one task, observing, the
This is where Uhlmann & Cohen’s suggestion automatic attribution of behavior to
saves the day. According to their study, at personality would be “corrected” by the
least, it seems to make anonymization slower, more cognitively demanding
irrelevant. What is needed is a decision about processes to actually be about the situation
and commitment to criteria before seeing the where appropriate. But when observing while
applications. Of course, that was only also doing a different, distracting task the
demonstrated for gender and so the effects for “correction” did not happen, leading to a
native vs. foreign names may be different. more shallow inference of cause and effect,
However, the same kind of discrimination by one could say. The study by Gilbert et al. was
constructing criteria has been shown in not in an employee selection setting, but I
racially prejudiced people between black/ believe that by using a more structured
white candidates (Hodson et al, 2002), so I interview, it is possible to lower the cognitive
think it is plausible that Uhlmann & Cohen’s load for the interviewer. By structuring the
suggestion may have similar effects in such interview, they have to be less active as
cases. perceivers, and not spend cognitive resources
thinking about their next question - and this
Implicit social cognition & the interview might have a positive effect on their
judgment.
In employee selection literature, the hiring
interview has a bad reputation. Based on a A structured interview, with predetermined
widely cited meta-analysis by Hunter & questions in a fixed order, decreases
Hunter (1984), interviews are seen to have a discrimination (Bragger, Kutcher, Morgan &
low predictive value compared to for example Firth, 2002) as well as raises the validity for
mental ability tests (Huffcutt & Arthur, 1994). predicting job performance (Huffcutt &
However, a later meta-analysis by Huffcutt & Arthur, 1994). One might suspect that a
Arthur (1994) shows both that interviews reason for the higher validity is precisely that
overall have a somewhat better validity than it decreases discrimination. The kind of
previously thought, and that structuring the discrimination biases that have been shown in
interview has the biggest effect on increasing experimental settings where identical
validity of interviews. In their analysis the candidate descriptions have been used, such
degree of structuring was rated on two as Uhlmann & Cohen (2007), can in my
dimensions, structuring of topics & questions opinion only be described as irrational and
or structuring of judging answers. faulty. To judge one candidate as better at the
job because he has a male name, compared to
It is relevant of course to consider why a more an identical candidate with a female name, is
structured inteview would be better than a to make a wrong judgment. From that
more informal one. A clue might perhaps be perspective, biased judgment in employee
the concept of cognitive busyness, in which selection is not only unfair to employees but
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harmful to the employer. That those methods to display that can not easily be attributed to
for selection that are less biased against some situational factor will likely be
women and minorities would also be of attributed to your personality.
higher validity is also in line with this
reasoning. A more structured interview would Implicit social cognition & tests
also be more strictly related to the job criteria
or some other, predetermined, points of When testing in a selection setting, it should
interest. This leaves less room for ambiguity be avoided to remind the candidate of his or
and thus, for prejudice to “fill in the blanks” her gender, age or ethnicity because that kind
as it tends to do (Uhlmann & Cohen, 2007). of priming can affect how well the candidate
does at the test. Men have been shown to
As a candidate you obviously have less power perform poorer at tests of recognising
to decide anything about how the process emotion, if they are first reminded that they
should be done, so all you have to work with are men or it is made apparent that the test is
is yourself. It may improve your chances in about empathy, activating stereotypes about
an interview to make use of the “chameleon men and empathic ability (Ickes, Gesn &
effect”, that is by letting yourself subtly Graham, 2000). Cultural prejudice is
follow the body language of the interviewer, ingrained also in us individually, even though
imitating their speech patterns, et cetera. This we may explicitly hold a different view
type of imitation has been shown to increase (Devine, 1989), and they can be activated and
liking between people (Chartrand & Bargh, affect performance. In studies examining how
1999). However, it is easy to see how this gender primes affect performance in
could go wrong and you probably shouldn’t mathematics, it has been shown that it is not
try too hard, or the interviewer might instead required that you prime specifically the belief
think you are trying to mock them. that “women are bad at math” to get women
to perform poorer. Seemingly all that is
In a study by Williams & Bargh (2008) it is needed to activate this belief, is to ask a
shown that holding something warm makes woman her gender (Steele & Ambady, 2006).
you perceive others as more warm, and makes
you more altruistic. Here the imagination can All tests that start out asking demographic
really go wild: what else will influence your questions, then, may be setting up some
behaviour without your knowledge? Will participants to fail.
eating crisp bread give you more “bite” in an
interview? Of course, controlling every little Much of organizational studies is dominated
detail in your environment is not possible. by explicit research methods such as different
But it may be wise as a candidate to prime kinds of self-reporting measures (Bing,
yourself in some positive ways. Hold LeBreton, Migetz & James, 2007). Making
something warm so that you’ll be more greater use of implicit methods would
friendly. Think of professors or books and improve the validity of studies through a kind
wear glasses to bring out your competence, or of triangulation effect, but may also be
imagine a time that you were being super attractive to practitioners because you can’t
social, or super confident, if that is what the fake implicit results like you can a normal
job will require. Any behaviour you are seen self-reported personality test, for example.
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When instructed to fake positive or negative
job attitudes, students were not able to do so Bodenhausen & Richeson (in Baumeister &
on an implicit association test (IAT) while Finkel, 2010, p. 351) refer to a study of the
they were being able to do so in explicit judgment of evidence in a legal context where
measures of job attitudes (Haines & Sumner, it was shown that initial judgment is based on
2006). stereotypes and that all evidence later
reviewed was seen as confirming the initial
There are concrete ideas for using implicit judgment. If stereotypes were not activated
tests in employee selection, for example until after the evidence was reviewed, it did
Johnson & Steinman (2009) present the idea not influence the final decision. Stereotypes
of using an IAT as a way of measuring seem to work similar to some physical
employees’ attitudes toward their supervisors. processes, for example the creation of pearls.
But if that supervisor is black and the One little irritant sets off a reaction that builds
employee white, it’s possible that some racial up around the original, very small irritant.
bias against black people would show in the Similarly, once a small, implicit prejudice is
IAT even though that employee actually quite activated everything following will tend to
likes their supervisor. And in either case, what gravitate towards it, fall in line with the initial
matters most in the workplace is surely how prejudice and thus bias what we think we see
people behave, not their implicit associations. and the decisions we make. One could argue
that a biased recruiter is made blind to reality
So a word of caution is appropriate. Maybe which surely is not the point of having
we should be glad that implicit testing has not recruiters, rather than some computer
really caught on in Sweden, as I think there program picking whom to hire.
could also be a risk of over using different
implicit tests in pursuit of the “true” person. Finding a recruiter that has as little implicit
As several studies have shown, implicit and prejudice as possible against people of colour,
explicit attitudes do not always agree, but I women or different age groups would
think it would be a mistake to assume the therefore, in my opinion, be better and IATs
implicit preference for something is always could, at least theoretically, aid in this pursuit.
more “true” than explicit preferences. Implicit
tests should be used to illuminate and explain The second way to tackle bias and
behavior, not to seek out “secret truths”. discrimination is of course in the selection
process rather than focusing on the selector.
However, one idea that springs to mind when We can try to avoid making for example
discussing implicit prejudice is that the IAT ethnicity or gender a salient factor, by not
methods would have their uses for selecting asking that kind of questions.
the selector, like a recruiter or any person that
have making decisions about and selecting One of the worst ways to combat bias is to be
other people as a big part of their job. As an content that whoever is hiring do not consider
employer we would wish to be fair, both to themselves to be “a racist” or “a sexist” and
give candidates an equal chance but most of leave it at that. In fact, believing you are
all to give ourselves a fair chance to find the “objective” has been shown to correlate with
best candidate. being more biased (Uhlmann & Cohen, 2006;
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Uhlmann & Cohen, 2007). This was When it comes to decision making more
particularly true for men. When men thought generally, there is some research that suggest
that they were objective, or when they were “gut feeling” may not be such a bad way to
primed to think of themselves as objective, decide after all. Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren,
they were a lot more biased against women in & van Baaren (2006) report on studies that
hiring context experiment (Uhlmann & show that when making complex decisions,
Cohen, 2007). “passive deliberation” proves superior to
active deliberation as well as impulse
The field of social psychology as a whole decisions. However, their study was only
seem to imply that anyone can be racist, or about different consumer decisions, not
sexist, and especially if you are a member of decisions about people. A similar study
that high status group of “white, Swedish measured how pleased people were with their
men” as hiring managers in Sweden often are. decision of picking a certain poster, after
Bodenhausen & Richeson (Baumeister & having explicitly thought and written about
Finkel, 2010, p. 360) bring up the point, their reasons for liking or disliking the
although still debated, that for example black different posters, or not having to do so. As it
people are less prone to ingroup bias than turns out, those who introspected about
white people are. Sometimes stigmatised reasons to prefer one poster over another
groups even display an outgroup bias. That is, chose different posters than those who were
it may be a misnomer to call it ingroup/ not asked to introspect, and were less satisfied
outgroup bias at all when in fact it is a “white with their choice of poster at the follow up
group bias.” (Wilson, Lisle, Schooler, Hodges, Klaaren &
LaFleur, 1993).
All things considered, it would seem that the
person least fit to judge others for jobs in In the light of studies like these, it is
Sweden is a white Swedish man using definitely plausible that hiring managers
unstructured interviews as his primary could make better decisions when letting their
selection method, especially if he thinks he is unconscious process information rather than
capable of “being objective”. My point being constricted by what the conscious
however is not that other people are likely to cognitive system can do. One of the
do better but that it would be wise to use proponents for basing decisions on your “gut
more structured methods, that can feelings”, Gerd Gigerenzer, makes the case by
compensate for human fallibility. contrasting a very complex scheme for
diagnosing heart disease with a much simpler
Implicit social cognition & the decision “rule of thumb”-system in which you use
fewer data points but get better decisions
Maybe it is redundant to make a section about (Gigerenzer, 2007). One could argue that if
“the decision,” as the whole of the employee “buying a car” is not much like hiring a
selection process is about decisions, in several person, maybe diagnosing disease is more at
steps. However, I still wanted to make a few the same level of complexity. But all the same
points about the decision making specifically. the science done on actual employee
selection, discrimination and implicit biases
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seem to be in favor of a more, not less, But I think that one thing that we can learn
analytical approach to employee selection. from these studies is that not being aware of
bias does more harm than good, so we should
Conclusions educate ourselves and those we can. There is
much to learn from the area of implicit social
When it comes to employee selection, the cognition that is highly relevant to employee
schizm remains between what research seems selection. I also think it is not meaningful to
to imply as best practice - structured think about the human brain or cognitive
interviews, deciding on criteria beforehand, systems as being faulty, or being good or bad.
using tests and generally leaving little room It is what it is. If we’re very implicitly
for selector discretion and “gut feeling” - and prejudiced, it is because our brain have
what practitioners seem to prefer: more learned it from the environment it has been in.
intuition, informal interviews. The point of all this is not to lay blame at
prejudiced recruiters but to make it clear how
It is perhaps not surprising that recruiters and we can build systems, processes, that work
hiring managers would like to think that they with our nature instead, in accordance with
personally add something valuable, values that we may hold, such as fairness &
something “extra” that makes it important due process, for the benefit of both employers
that they themselves play an active role in and job seekers. And through the study of
making the decisions, rather than leaving it to implicit social cognition it is clear that such
an algorithm of tests & structured interview processes are important, that leaving it up to
answers. Maybe it feels threatening to learn the individual recruiter to try to be bias free
about all the biases and prejudice that the and make good predictions is simply ignorant
social psychology flavor of brain is riddled of what human cognition is capable of in an
with - better to believe in your own good environment that is not without biases.
judgment.
Gisela Jönsson has a bachelors degree in work & organizational psychology and works
as a research assistant at Stockholm University.
Website: www.giselajonsson.se
twitter: @giselaj
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