Atribución consecuencia del otorgamiento de la guarda y custodia

In his autobiography, Daniel Kahneman (2003a) explains that his Nobel prize-winning research on heuristics and biases was inspired by his experiences as an interviewer when assessing candidates for officer training in the Israeli army. Kahneman noted that despite his confidence in the judgments, the actual validity was low. Ironically, despite that the heuristics and biases approach finds its origin in the job interview, and is rooted in dual-process theory, it is rarely applied as a theoretical framework underlying interview decision making and interview bias (Dipboye, et al, 2012). Over time there have been major evolutions in selection, and interviewing has been professionalized much. However, even in spite of these developments one persistent finding has been that stigmatizing applicant characteristics still bias interview outcome. Therefore, the current paper adds to the literature by providing an in-depth framework on the cognitive and social processes, during each stage of the interview, that underlie biased decision-making in job interviews.

For a long time, interviewer decision making has been approached from a rather rationalist perspective as interviewers were expected to base their evaluations purely on job-relevant information exchanged during the interview stage. Such conscious deliberation of facts to form an overall evaluation represents a decision process that is fully influenced by conscious Type 2

processes, and occurs following the interview in a separate decision-making stage. However, findings that the interviewer’s initial impression of the applicant predicts interview outcome challenges the rationalist perspective, and also suggests that decision-making, although occurring following the interview, is a dynamic process that spans across the different interview stages.

Building on dual-process theory, we described the influence of the applicant’s stigma on processes throughout various interview stages. By outlining the specific role of dual processing mechanisms in each of these stages, as well as across stages, we aim to provide a better understanding of how stigmatizing applicant characteristics influence interviewer decision-making in the job interview. We state that interview bias originates in the initial impression formation process, and differentially affects the level of individuation, the information gathering strategy and information processing, and interviewers’ final evaluations and decision confidence.

Through this “building block” approach, researchers may further investigate specific processes in each of the interview stages in function of the propositions made by this model. We aim to inspire future attempts to design interventions tailored to specific stages and decision-making processes during the interview. Noteworthy intervention strategies, such as acknowledgment of the stigma by the applicant, and individuation, have been developed from an applicant perspective (Hebl & Skorinko, 2005; Singletary & Hebl, 2009). One intriguing finding was that intervening early in the interview is most effective, a finding consistent with the importance of initial impression formation. Findings that early interventions are more effective fit the presented framework as these directly challenge the interviewer’s initial impression, and the initial impression formation process, during rapport building. Applicant-centered intervention strategies, such as acknowledgment, appears to be a fruitful line of further research, and more types of interventions should be investigated.

Intervention strategies could however also focus on the interview procedure, and more specifically the rapport-building stage, when the important initial impression is created by the interviewers. Such structural intervention methods should depart from the source of the stigma (e.g., visual or verbal), and tailor the intervention to reduce or delay the effects of the stigma on impression

formation. This could be achieved by designing interview procedures that allow interviewers to form an initial impression of stigmatized applicants which is uncorrupted by the applicant’s stigmatizing feature. For example, if the applicant’s stigmatizing feature is exclusively of a visual nature (e.g., obesity, physical disability, facial deformation), then it is possible to remove this cue from the interviewers’ awareness or visibility during the initial impression formation process (e.g., no visual contact during rapport-building). Building on the presented framework, this adjustment to the interview procedure should be able to attenuate the effects of the stigmatizing applicant feature on the initial impression, and the initial impression formation process, and therefore reduce the effects on interviewer behavior, cognition, and decision-making, that are currently found in the traditional job interview. Although we present one unified theoretical account underlying bias in interview judgments, and we do not differentiate in the source of the applicant feature (e.g., visual cues such as obesity, or verbal cues such as accents), we are cautious to assume that there would be one single structural intervention method that could reduce bias based on different stigmatizing sources.

Although we present a model that focuses specifically on the job interview, the effect of applicants’ stigmatizing characteristics should be considered in a broader context (i.e., type of job; multiple stigma and categorization; e.g., Heilman, 1983; Kulik, Roberson, & Perry, 2007) and a broader selection context. Moreover, initial impression formation during the pre- interview stage also includes the review of the applicant’s paper credentials (Dipboye & Johnson, 2013) and social networking sites (Kluemper & Rosen, 2009). There is ample evidence that during this stage bias also occurs based on stigmatizing features (Agerström & Rooth, 2011; Cole, Rubin, Feild, & Giles, 2007; Derous, Ryan, & Serlie, 2014). However, when the stigma can’t be observed in résumés (e.g., anonymous job applications; Krause, Rinne, & Zimmermann, 2012) or the stigmatized applicant is invited for an interview, one important question is how this affects the interviewer’s initial impression. Or, more generally, future studies should address the question to what extent impression formation occurs prior to the face-to-face interview, and how this

may affect the initial impression formation during rapport-building and interview outcome.

In sum, we present a theoretical framework of interview bias that draws upon dual-process theory. This framework proposes that the origin of bias lies in fast and frugal judgments made during the initial impression formation process, and subsequently affects the interviewer during all stages of the interview process. Framing the interview within dual-process theory can spur new research directions, such as a focus on the interviewer and the decision-making process, and can challenge researchers to design intervention methods that facilitates objectivity in the job interview.