Perceptual confirmation in the employment interview: The moderating roles of time pressure and need for cognitive closure

The current study was designed to investigate whether employment interviewers' expectations, motivations and cognitive resources can influence how they evaluate and recall job applicants' behaviors. In two experiments, undergraduate student participants evaluated and recalled information from an applicant's interview after they reviewed her preinterview materials (i.e., job description, resume, personality profile) and watched her videotaped interview. Participants' expectations were manipulated in Experiment 1 by presenting participants with a personality profile that indicated the applicant was either high or low in extraversion. Need for Cognitive Closure (NFCC), a measure of a person's motivation to arrive at a final decision, was assessed as a predictor and moderator of participants' evaluations and recall of information in Experiment 2. Cognitive resources were manipulated in both experiments by providing instructions to participants to either evaluate the applicant as quickly as possible (time pressure) or take as much time as they needed to evaluate the applicant (no time pressure). The results of Experiment 1 show that low expectations can strongly influence subsequent judgments of and memory for the applicant's behavior in the interview. These effects were consistent across time pressure conditions, which suggests that the biasing effect of interviewers' expectations may not be weakened by reducing time pressure on the interviewer. In contrast, high expectations had very little effect on participants' evaluations of and memory for applicant's behavior. The results of Experiment 2 indicate interviewers' level of NFCC will not affect their reliance on their expectations for the applicant. The current study confirms previous research that shows reviewing preinterview materials can create expectations that bias interviewers' evaluations of and memory for the applicant's interview performance. The study was unable, however, to provide additional insight into how interviewers' cognitive resources and motivation affect the influence of their expectations on their evaluations of and memory for applicants' behaviors.