Category: Social psychology

Prepare for an interview the scientific way with these 10 tips straight from psychological research on schmoozing, mental imagery and more…

In a competitive marketplace it’s harder than ever to prepare for an interview so that you stand out from the others.

You will have followed all the usual advice about how to prepare for an interview: researched the organisation beforehand, dressed professionally, arrived early, avoided vomiting on the interviewer and all the rest.

Now you’re in the interview and starting to talk, how can you impress them?

Hiring decisions are made on more than just skills and experience.

It’s also about gut feelings and instinctual reactions.

All sorts of subtle psychological factors come into play; so here are ten techniques which can help you give the interviewer the feeling that you are the one.

1. Schmooze but don’t self-promote

Schmoozing is good.

One study looked at 116 students just out of college trying to get their first job (Higgins & Judge, 2004).

The students who did best at interview were the most ingratiating: they praised the organisation, complimented the interviewer, showed enthusiasm, discussed common interests, smiled and maintained eye contact.

In contrast, blatant self-promotion was surprisingly ineffective.

It made little difference going on about skills, abilities and the positive events they’d been responsible for.

It also didn’t help much taking charge of the interview or having impressive university scores.

So, although employers often say that work experience and qualifications are the most important factors in choosing the right person for the job, this study begs to differ.

What most predicted whether they were considered a fit for the company was their ability to schmooze.

It’s influence tactics that win the day (find out more in my series on the psychology of persuasion).

2. Demonstrate being in control at interview

Interviewers often ask questions about how you dealt with difficult situations in the past.

You’ve probably prepared an answer, but does it display the qualities the interviewer is looking for?

To answer impressively, research suggests you should emphasise how you controlled these difficult situations, rather than letting them control you (Silvester et al., 2003).

Employers want to see you are taking the initiative yourself.

3. Talk to yourself to prepare for an interview

Most of us talk to ourselves from time-to-time to aid performance in many areas of our lives.

It’s often said that talking to yourself is a sign of madness or certainly that you’ve been reading too many dodgy self-help books.

Well, it may be a bit cheesy, but in the context of job interviews—and when it’s called ‘verbal self-guidance’—it does seem to work (Latham & Budworth, 2006).

You can say things to yourself like “I can enter the room in a confident manner,” and “I can smile and firmly shake the interviewer’s hand” when preparing for an interview.

And you can implement other points mentioned here or elsewhere in the same way.

Just don’t talk to yourself out loud and in front of the interviewer…

4. Prepare for an interview with mental imagery

If top athletes can successfully use mental imagery to improve their performance, then why not job interviewees to prepare for an interview?

In one study, half the participants were instructed to visualise themselves feeling confident and relaxed when preparing for an interview (Knudstrup, Segrest, & Hurley, 2003).

Then they imagined the interview went well and they were offered the job.

Those who used mental imagery when preparing performed better at a simulated job interview than those who didn’t.

The mental imagery group also experienced less stress during the interview.

5. Positive body language but avoid fake smile

Think about the type of body language when you prepare for an interview.

All the usual positive body language can help make a good impression: smiling, eye contact, forward lean and body orientation.

All of these nonverbal behaviours have been shown to positively affect interviewer ratings (Levine and Feldman, 2002).

That said, try to avoid too much fake smiling.

False smiling during an interview results in less favourable evaluations than does genuine smiling (Woodzicka, 2008).

The same may well be true for all body language that might appear too fake.

6. Prepare a firm handshake for the interview

While we’re talking about body language and preparing for an interview, we might as well mention the handshake.

It’s difficult to believe a handshake makes that much of a difference, but the research begs to differ.

Stewart et al. (2008) found that a good quality handshake did affect hiring recommendations.

In this study the importance of a firm shake was greater for women.

7. Be defensive at interview if required

Often the advice to prepare for an interview is to avoid being defensive.

People say you shouldn’t make excuses for holes in your experience or apologise for your shortcomings.

This isn’t always true.

In fact, some research suggests you shouldn’t worry about being defensive if the situation calls for it.

When problems emerged in a simulated job interview, applicants who made excuses, expressed remorse and promised it wouldn’t happen again, were rated higher than those who avoided being defensive (Tsai et al., 2010).

8. Be upfront about weaknesses

We’ve all got weak spots in our CVs, but is it best to try and cover them up or to be upfront and honest when thinking about how to prepare for an interview?

Given that liking is the most important factor in job interviews, the problem becomes how to reveal those weak spots without damaging the interviewer’s liking for us.

Jones and Gordon (1972) tested whether damaging revelations are best made at the start or end of an interaction.

They found that when someone was upfront about weaknesses, those listening liked him more than if he or she concealed it until the end.

It seems that we find honesty refreshing so interviewees should be upfront about their weakness.

Exactly the reverse is true for strengths.

Coming out with your biggest achievements upfront is boastful; these make a better impression if left to the end, as though they had to be dragged out of you.

There may also be a memory effect at work here.

When you leave the interview on a high, that is the impression that the interviewers carry of you into their deliberations.

9. Prepare to cut out fillers in an interview

Fillers are utterances like ‘er’ and ‘like’.

One study has found that interviewees who overuse the word like, and put in, like, too many, errr, fillers, were found less professional and were less likely to be hired (Russell et al., 2008).

When preparing for an interview, imagine talking as fluently as you can.

10. Prepare to be unique at interview

You’ve learnt the same old responses to the same old interview questions.

But is this wise if you want to stand out from the crowd?

One recent study has found that interviewees who answer standard questions in novel ways are at an advantage (Roulin et al., 2011).

Across different job types, ages and levels of education, they found that interviewer’s ratings were higher for those who gave novel answers.

This may be because novel answers are easier to recall and being memorable is a good thing—as long as it’s for the right reasons.

Coaching helps prepare for an interview

If you’re still not getting success at interview, then think about interview coaching.

Coaching can encourage you to exhibit the right body language, ingratiate yourself with the interviewer and better communicate your skills and experience.

Research suggests coaching can help people improve their interview performance with the correct preparation (Maurer et al., 2008).

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Social facilitation is the finding from social psychology that people’s performance can improve on some tasks when other people are present.

Social facilitation is a social psychological finding that in some circumstances the presence of other people can improve performance.

While people are prone to social loafing when they can hide in a group, when they are being individually judged on the performance, it can make them work harder.

So, audiences or the presence of other people does not always improve performance — it depends on the exact circumstances.

Social facilitation examples

Everyday examples of social facilitation include:

• A cyclist going faster when in a group with others.
• An actor performing better in front of a full audience than in rehearsals.
• An athlete who performs better in competition than when practising alone.

But the history of social facilitation research does not start with these examples, but with ants.

History of social facilitation research

When an ant builds a nest on her own she does so with little enthusiasm.

She moves as though tired of life, bored with the whole business of excavating earth, perhaps dreaming of a better life elsewhere.

But give our ant a co-worker and she is transformed into a dynamo, a workaholic, an Olympian amongst insects.

Soon she is digging at five times the rate or more…

Ants aren’t the only ones to display social facilitation.

Four decades before S. C. Chen reported his ant findings in 1937, the psychologist Norman Triplett had already noticed much the same social facilitation behaviour in cyclists.

Cycling and social facilitation

Triplett scoured the records of the ‘League of American Wheelmen’ and found that racing cyclists rode faster when paced or in competition.

Analysing the results of many races he found that, on average, cyclists with a pacemaker covered each mile about 5 seconds quicker than those without — social facilitation again.

He suspected it was more than just the purely physical effect of slipstreaming behind another cyclist, that the effect was also psychological — something to do with the mere presence of other people.

Is social facilitation more than just competition?

Two decades later Gordon Allport — one of the founders of personality psychology — did just that.

He had participants write down as many words as they could that were related to a given target word.

They were given three one-minute periods and told they were not in competition with each other.

Again, participants reliably produced more words when others were present than when alone, revealing a social facilitation effect.

To test his hunch Triplett (1898) set children winding a thread on a reel, sometimes on their own and sometimes against others.

What he found confirmed his social facilitation theory: the children went faster when in competition.

While interesting, though, the finding that people work faster in competition is hardly ground-breaking, but what if the competitive element could be removed and effect of mere presence could be measured?

While Allport’s experimental procedure might not have completely eliminated the effects of competition, subsequent studies, and there were many, certainly did.

This boost to people’s performance when watched by others became known as social facilitation and for a few decades it was all the rage in psychology.

Social inhibition

Unfortunately, social facilitation experimenters soon discovered that human psychology is a fraction more complicated than ant psychology.

Most worryingly, experimenters failed to find the expected social facilitation in a whole range of other tasks, for example when people were asked to learn lists of nonsense syllables or navigate a complicated maze.

It emerged that when the tasks were harder their performance wasn’t improved, quite the contrary, it got worse.

People seemed to be experiencing not social facilitation but social inhibition.

They were choking and so were the psychologists who all but abandoned social facilitation research as a bad lot.

Social facilitation and drive theory

It wasn’t until the 1960s that research on social facilitation was revived by the noted psychologist Professor Robert Zajonc.

He thought that the contradictory results from social facilitation experiments could be explained by a new approach called ‘drive theory’.

Zajonc said that when other people are watching us we get more alert and excited and this excitement fires up what he called our ‘dominant response’.

Examples of dominant responses are things like well-practised skills or particular habits.

If this dominant response fits with the situation then our social facilitation occurs, but if the dominant response is inappropriate then we tend to perform poorly.

This theory explained the evidence quite well but critics thought it too simplistic, arguing that it’s not just whether an audience is present or not, it is also how we react to that presence.

To help account for this cognitive process, a new theory was put forward by Robert S Baron in the 1980s.

Distracted and conflicted

Distraction-conflict theory argues that when other people are watching us it creates an attentional conflict between the task we are performing and the watching others.

When the task is easy we can successfully narrow our focus to the task at hand and so our performance improves, probably because of the drive effect to which Zajonc refers.

When the task is tricky, though, we suffer from attentional overload and our performance gets worse.

Pessin (1933) had already noted just this effect when people performed tasks with flashing lights and loud noises distracting them instead of an audience.

Here at last, 100 years after Triplett had children winding fishing reels, came a theory that in concert with Zajonc’s drive theory, has the potential to explain the social facilitation effect: when and how an audience either improves our performance or worsens it.

Distraction-conflict theory in particular makes the complex effects of an audience much easier to understand because it focuses on how we manage our attention.

The psychology of attention, though, is a strange beast affected by all kinds of factors that consequently also tweak the social facilitation effect:

1. Audience evaluation. How we evaluate the audience determines our reaction, for example, is the audience watching closely or are they just passing through? Huguet et al., (1999) unsuprisingly found that attentive audiences are more distracting than inattentive audiences.
2. Opposite sex audience. People usually find opposite sex audiences more distracting and so men are more inhibited on difficult tasks (but better on well-practised tasks) when watched by women and vice versa.
   
3. Mood. Good moods may in certain circumstances facilitate performance and bad moods inhibit them (Mash & Hedley, 1975).

And the list goes on. If it affects attention it’s likely to affect the social facilitation/inhibition effect.

Groups: good or bad for performance?

Whether other people improve or worsen performance naturally depends on the exact circumstances of the group.

Research in social loafing finds that when people are involved in, for examples, an additive task like pulling on a rope, they slack off, often by more than 50 percent.

In this situation, groups are bad for performance partly because individuals can hide.

In contrast, social facilitation/inhibition effects come to the fore when individuals can be picked out of the bunch, when they are being judged on their performance alone.

Like ants the presence of others can push us on to greater achievements, but, because we are human, it can also push us towards disaster.

Psychological research suggests it all depends on managing attention, channelling the body’s physiological response and how good we are at the task itself.

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The definition of social loafing in psychology is that the more people there are in a group, the less work they do — but it can be reduced.

Groups can be fantastically unproductive because they provide such wonderful camouflage.

Under cover of group work people will slack off, happy in the knowledge others are probably doing the same.

And even if they’re not: who’ll know?

What is social loafing?

This is the meaning to what psychologists have nattily called social loafing and it was beautifully demonstrated by a French professor of agricultural engineering called Max Ringelmann as early as the 1890s.

Ringelmann, often credited as one of the founders of social psychology, had people pull on ropes either separately or in groups of various sizes and he measured how hard they pulled.

He found that the more people were in the group, the less work they did (see graph).

Notice that people did about half as much work when there were 8 others in the group than they did on their own.

Social loafing around the world

Since Ringelmann’s original study many others have got the same result using different types of tasks.

Most entertainingly Professor Bibb Latané and colleagues had people cheering, shouting and clapping in groups as loud as they could (Latané et al., 1979).

When people were in groups of six they only shouted at one-third of their full capacity.

The lazy so-and-sos.

The effect has been found in different cultures including Indians, Taiwanese, French, Polish and Americans, it’s been found in tasks as diverse as pumping air, swimming, evaluating poems, navigating mazes and in restaurant tipping.

However social loafing is less prevalent in collectivist cultures such as those in many Asian countries, indeed sometimes it is reversed.

It’s not hard to see why this finding might worry people in charge of all kinds of organisations.

But note that social loafing is most detrimental to the productivity of a group when it is carrying out ‘additive tasks’: ones where the effort of each group member is summed.

Not all tasks fit in to this category.

For example a group problem-solving session relies on the brains of the best people in the group – social loafing wouldn’t necessarily reduce productivity in this group as markedly.

Causes of social loafing

These are some of the standard explanations put forward for the social loafing effect in psychology:

• People expect each other to loaf. Whether consciously or unconsciously people say to themselves: everyone else is going to slack off a bit so I’ll slack off a bit as well because it’s not fair if I do more work than the others.
• Anonymity. When groups are larger the individuals become more anonymous. Imagine you’re doing something on your own: if it goes well you get all the glory, if it goes wrong you get all the blame. In a group both blame and glory is spread, so there’s less carrot and less stick.
• No standards. Often groups don’t have set standards so there’s no clear ideal for which to aim.

These explanations naturally beg the question of how people would behave if they didn’t expect each other to loaf, they weren’t anonymous and there were clear standards – after all groups do often work under much better conditions than those induced in some laboratory studies.

Indeed lab studies by psychologists have often been criticised for giving people boring or meaningless tasks and for putting them in random groups.

How to reduce social loafing

Still people in groups clearly do loaf in real life so here are a few factors found to be important in reducing social loafing:

• Task importance. Studies have shown that when people think the task is important they do less loafing. Zacarro (1984) found that groups constructing ‘moon tents’ (don’t ask me!) worked harder if they thought the relevance of the task was high, thought they were in competition with another group and were encouraged to think the task was attractive.
• Group importance. When the group is important to its members they work harder. Worchel et al. (1998) had people building paper chains in two groups, one which had name tags, matching coats and a sense of competition. Compared to a group given none of these, they produced 5 more paper chains.
• Decreasing the ‘sucker effect’. The sucker effect is that feeling of being duped when you think that other people in the group are slacking off. Reducing or eliminating this perception is another key to a productive group.

This is just three, many more have been suggested, including: how easily each member’s contribution can be evaluated, how unique each individual’s contribution is and how individually identifiable they are.

The drift is that people can be made to work harder by cutting off their natural tendency to hide in the group.

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A simple (nonsexual) arm touch can increase compliance, helping behaviour, attraction, and signal power.

To get around in the world, we mainly rely on our eyes and ears.

Touch is a sense that’s often forgotten.

But touch is also vital in the way we understand and experience the world.

Even the lightest touch on the upper arm can influence the way we think.

To prove it, here are 10 psychological effects which show just how powerful nonsexual touch can be.

1. Arm touch for money

A well-timed touch can encourage other people to return a lost item.

In one experiment, users of a phone booth who were touched were more likely to return a lost dime to an experimenter (Kleinke, 1977).

The action was no more than a light touch on the arm.

People will do more than that though; people will give a bigger tip to a waitress who has touched them (Crusco & Wetzel, 1984).

(Stop giggling at the back there!)

2. Arm touch for help

People are also more likely to provide help when touched.

In one study, strangers who were touched lightly on the arm were more likely to help an experimenter pick up things they had dropped (Gueguen, 2003).

The percentage of people who helped went up from 63% to 90%.

3. Arm touch for compliance

The power of a light touch on the upper arm often extends more broadly to compliance.

In a study by Willis and Hamm (1980), participants were asked to sign a petition.

While 55% of those not touched agreed to sign it, this went up to 81% of those participants touched once on the upper arm.

A second study asked people to fill in a questionnaire.

The same touch increased compliance from 40% to 70%.

4. Touch twice for more compliance

And you can increase compliance with a second light touch on the arm.

Vaidis and Halimi-Falkowicz (2008) tried this out when asking people in the street to complete a questionnaire.

Those touched twice were more likely to complete the questionnaire than those touched once.

The effects were strongest when men were touched by a female surveyor.

5. Or, touch for a fight!

However, the acceptability of touch, especially between men, depends a lot on culture.

When Dolinski (2010) carried out a compliance experiment in Poland, he got quite different results for men and women.

In Poland men asked to do the experimenter a favour reacted badly to a light touch on the arm.

This seemed to be related to higher levels of homophobia. Women, however, still reacted positively to touch.

6. Arm touch to sell your car

Unlike Poland, France has a contact culture and touching is acceptable between two men.

So French researchers Erceau and Gueguen (2007) approached random men at a second-hand car market.

Half were touched lightly on the arm for 1 second, the other half weren’t.

Afterwards those who had been touched rated the seller as more sincere, friendly, honest, agreeable and kind.

Not bad for a 1-second touch.

We can safely assume the results would have been quite different in Poland!

7. Arm touch for a date

You won’t be surprised to hear that men show more interest in a woman who has lightly touched them.

But here’s the research anyway: Gueguen (2010) found men easily misinterpreted a light nonsexual touch on the arm as a show of sexual interest.

Perhaps more surprisingly women also responded well to a light touch on the arm when being asked for their phone number by a man in the street (Gueguen, 2007).

This may be because women associated a light 1 or 2-second touch with greater dominance.

(Bear in mind, though, that this research was in France again!)

8. Touch for power

Touch communicates something vital about power relationships. Henley (1973) observed people in a major city as they went about their daily business.

The people who tended to touch others (versus those being touched) were usually higher status.

Generally we regard people who touch others as having more power in society (Summerhayes & Suchner, 1978).

9. Forearm touch to communicate

Touch comes in many different forms and can communicate a variety of different emotions.

Just how much can be communicated through touch alone is demonstrated by one remarkable study by Hertenstein et al. (2006).

Using only a touch on the forearm, participants in this study tried to communicate 12 separate emotions to another person.

The receiver, despite not being able to see the toucher, or the touch itself, were pretty accurate for anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude and sympathy.

Accuracy ranged from 48% to 83%.

To put it in context, that is as good as we can do when we can see someone’s face.

10. Massage for maths

So, if you can do all that with a touch, imagine what you could do with a massage!

Well, one study has found that it can boost your maths skills (Field, 1996).

Compared with a control group, participants who received massages twice a week for 5 weeks were not only more relaxed but also did better on a maths test.

Once again, witness the incredible power of touch.

Boring disclaimer

All of these studies rely on the touch being appropriate.

Being touched can have quite different meanings depending on situation, culture and gender.

Generally the touch referred to is a light touch on the upper arm—the safest place to touch someone you don’t know.

Also, research has identified a small proportion of people—both men and women—who don’t like to be touched at all during everyday social interactions.

These people are not likely to respond positively in any of these situations.

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The idea that 93 percent of communication is nonverbal is a myth deriving from studies by Albert Mehrabian and others.

The idea that the vast majority of communication occurs nonverbally is quoted everywhere from advertising to popular psychology articles.

In fact the original experiments from which these findings derive only applied to communicating attitudes and feelings.

That hasn’t stopped them being applied universally.

Even just considering attitudes and feelings though, these studies on what percentage of communication is nonverbal have been questioned.

What percentage of communication is nonverbal?

Some of the most influential studies to claim high importance for the nonverbal component of communication were carried out by Albert Mehrabian (Mehrabian, 1972).

In one study, participants had to judge the positive, negative or neutral content of various words.

Three were chosen to be positive – ‘dear’, ‘thanks’ and ‘honey’ – three neutral – ‘oh’, ‘maybe’ and ‘really’ – and three negative – ‘brute’, ‘don’t’ and ‘terrible’.

Each was then read in either a positive, neutral or negative tone of voice.

In a second study, participants had to judge if the word ‘maybe’ was positive, negative or neutral from looking at a photograph of a person with a positive, negative or neutral face.

From these, and similar experiments, Mehrabian claimed the face conveyed 55 percent of the information, the voice 38 percent and the words just 7 percent.

Criticism of nonverbal communication study

The criticism of these experiments is pretty obvious.

Although they are interesting, they don’t provide an effective analogue for real social situations.

This is what psychologists call a lack of ecological validity.

It’s not often we use just one word on its own (unless you count swearing).

12.5 times more powerful?

A social psychologist, Michael Argyle, tried to address the problems with Mehrabian’s work.

In his studies whole passages of text were acted out in positive, negative and neutral tones.

The actual methodology was more complicated than Mehrabian’s work but also led to the conclusion that nonverbal channels are 12.5 times more powerful in communicating interpersonal attitudes and feelings than the verbal channel.

The same criticism comes to mind again.

Why should the reading of a paragraph be considered an analogue for spontaneous forms of speech?

Demand characteristics

Perhaps an even stronger criticism of these studies relates to their ‘demand characteristics’.

Demand characteristics is a term psychologists use when they are referring to participants in an experiment acting in ways they think the experimenter wants them to act.

People generally want to please, they want to go with the flow.

So, if they can work out what the experimenter is after, they’ll often try and give it to them.

So, when watching videos in these experiments it will be obvious to participants the speeches are acted, not spontaneous.

Participants pick up on what the experimenter wants from the social cues provided.

Indeed, one study has found that when the purpose of the experiment is actually well-camouflaged from the participants, the dominance of nonverbal communication disappears (Trimboli & Walker, 1987).

So, maybe most of the meaning from communication actually does come from the words that people use.

Boring, but probably true.

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