"A particular example (i. e., of irrationality) involves interviews. Despite all the evidence about the uselessness of interviews in predicting future behavior, people remain convinced that some people—especially themselves—are superb at “psyching out” other people during an interview. In contrast, the research indicates that interviews are effective only insofar as they yield information they could more consistently and more validly be incorporated into a statistical model. One problem, of course, that leads to the belief in the superiority of the unstructured interview is that it is, in fact, not studied; there is almost no systematic feedback to most interviewers. Much of the time, the interviewer is in a particular position in an organization and never sees the interviewee again. Second, if the interviewer does see the interviewee later, then that means that the interviewee has been accepted, which often implies fairly reasonable performance. Moreover, it is always possible to rationalize failures."
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Non-fiction authors from the United StatesPsychologists from the United StatesWomen academics from the United StatesPeople from PittsburghCarnegie Mellon University faculty
Original Language: English
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Chapter 4, “Irrationality as a “Reasonable” Response to an Incomplete Specification” (p. 65)
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Robyn Dawes
Robyn Mason Dawes (July 23, 1936 – December 14, 2010) was an American psychologist who specialized in the field of human judgment.
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