Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 191

“NICE TO MEET YOU. YOU’RE HIRED!” JOB INTERVIEWS IN SECONDS

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You have probably heard of speed dating, where singles gather in a large room and rapidly move from table to table, person to person, quickly evaluating others who are also searching for a romantic partner. Many employers have applied this notion to the hiring process to increase administrative efficiency. The basic setup is similar: a large job fair with multiple employers seated at various tables and job applicants—often including college students—who bounce from table to table in hopes of making a splash in their brief time before the interviewer. Interactions typically last between five and fifteen minutes, forcing interviewers to rapidly “size up” job candidates. Speed interviewing is becoming increasingly popular among U.S. corporations (Needleman, 2007; Ramsey, 2006) and has been utilized by companies ranging from IBM, Texas Instruments, Abbott Labs, to Travelodge. But can employers make good decisions based on a such brief exposure to candidates? Quite possibly. Research on “thin slices” suggests that humans are capable of making remarkably accurate impressions of strangers within a few minutes and sometimes less.

Psychologist John Gottman has demonstrated a similar phenomenon with respect to marital longevity (Gottman & Levenson, 1999). Gottman’s research team examined videotapes of fifteen-minute discussions of marital conflict between one hundred twenty-four newlywed couples. His researchers coded each second of the interview with an emotion word based on facial expressions and then used these ratings to form an overall impression of the relationship. Gottman found that his interviewers were able to accurately predict whether or not the couple was still married six years later based on just the first three minutes of the marital interaction! This is the same basic logic behind speed interviewing: Ask a few targeted questions, monitor nonverbal behavior (e.g., eye contact) and verbal responses, and decide who to immediately reject and who to invite back for an extended interview. As we’ll see in this chapter, forming impressions of others can occur in a remarkably brief period of time, often quite accurately. Sometimes, though, rapid first impressions rely too heavily on shortcuts, leading to imperfect assessments. Here again we see the trade-off between rapid, efficient processing (the X-system) and more deliberate, resource-intensive processing (the C-system) discussed previously; the trade-off is the hinge pin for claiming that we have free will. We’ll describe the key components of social perception, discussing evolutionary, contextual, and individual-level influences on this very important dimension of human social behavior. In addition, social perception is a key element in our sociality because our construals of the actions and motives of others affects not only how we treat them but also how they treat us.


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Social Psychology

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