Are Interviews Fair?

For the past few weeks I have been interviewing with different employers for summer internships. A lot of the interviews I have done so far have been over the phone. The readings from this week made me question the nature of the interviews: whether phone interviews can substitute in-person interviews and whether interviews in general should be in a written format instead of a spoken one. 

The paper, “The Social Weight of Spoken Words”, focuses on the variability of speech and its effects on the listener’s perception of the speaker. It was found that “voice cues activate social representations fast and early during the process of spoken language understanding”. This early activation and access to social representations can allow for our biases to influence how we attend to speech in the first place and how we allocate our cognitive resources. This is turn influences our memory of the auditory information. The paper, “Effects of phonetically-cued talker variation on semantic encoding”, gives us an example of how this variability in speech can affect the listener’s memory of what was said. The paper presents a study in which General American listeners participated in either a semantic priming or a false-memory task, each with three talkers with different accents: GA, New York City (NYC), and Southern Standard British English (BE). The results of the study showed that GA/BE induced strong semantic priming and low false recall rates while NYC induced no semantic priming but high false recall rates. From the results of these studies we can say that spoken interviews are not a good way of assessing applicants because this style of interviewing will put an applicant with a more “prestigious” accent at an advantage to an equally qualified applicant with a less prestigious accent.  

In the paper, “The Social Weight of Spoken Words”, Sumner also suggests that how each individual internalizes an event depends on his/her own goals, desires, and social experiences. This made me think that it would only be fair if the same interviewer interviews all applicants for a specific position. This eliminates the problem of an applicant being “lucky” and getting an interviewer who has similar interests to him/her and a different applicant getting an interviewer who is very different from them. In the first case, the interviewer will have all their cognitive 

faculties tuned toward the interview, likely to remember more of what was discussed. In the second case, the interviewer might be calculating the remaining time and not paying attention to what the applicant is saying and only remembering the gist of what was said. 

Overall, we can see that it is difficult to come up with a way of assessing applicants that is not affected by personal bias.