Month: May 2026

Cameron Sandmire

Out of the list of tests provided, I decided to test my bias on disability. The reason I chose this is because I have been taught to feel empathy toward disabled people and I wanted to see if that held up. The test was difficult and challenged not my beliefs, but how quickly I was able to respond to associations between good, bad, disabled, and abled. Although I felt like my brain had melted by the end of the test, I learned a lot.

The results I got indicated a moderate automatic preference towards abled people over physically disabled people. This shocked me for a lot of reasons, especially because I would never guess that I have an implicit bias towards that specific group of people. In the article “How to Think about Implicit Bias” they say “Most measures in psychology, from aptitude tests to personality scales, are useful for predicting how groups will respond on average, not forecasting how particular individuals will behave.” This resonated with me because I do not believe that an unconscious bias would determine action or treatment in an unfavorable manor towards a disabled person. By this I mean that I always try to treat disabled people as kindly as possible without being offensively kind because life is harder for them and I want no part in making it even harder. Where the bias comes in is that initial feeling long before you act, but who you are is determined by what happens in-between that underlying initial bias and action. I think to counteract any implicit bias one has you must be patient enough to analyze the person and situation before speaking or acting.

Sources:

Payne, K., Niemi, L., & Doris, J. M. (2018, March 27). How to think about implicit bias. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-think-about-implicit-bias/

Be Better Blog. (2021). Understanding implicit bias — and how to work through it. bhgrecareer.com. https://bhgrecareer.com/bebetterblog/implicit-bias/

I used to feel nervous going into interviews until I realized that the employer is being evaluated too. Nothing made that clearer than my first job at a Hawaiian grill near my parents house. There was no interview. I showed up, signed a w2 and I9, before I knew it I was cooking over a 500 degree grill with no AC in the middle of summer. This interview had no fixed set of questions and no systematic scoring procedures making it an unstructured interview(lecture 3). 

My next experience was the complete opposite. I interviewed at a local golf club and was asked tangible, job relevant questions that clearly tied in to the actual responsibilities of the role. It felt like they knew exactly what they were looking for which is a key difference between an interview that’s grounded in job analysis and one that isn’t. Questions tied to real job tasks give you real information about a candidate, which is exactly why that interview felt different from the start as mentioned in lecture two of the week 5 course materials.

Then came my first corporate interviews. Four rounds of interviews, three months of waiting, and questions like Four interview rounds, three months of waiting, and questions like “Can you walk me through a time when you had to navigate a complex interpersonal dynamic within a team setting?” Chamorro-Premuzic and Steinmetz (2013) warn that free-form interviews “can easily feed false perceptions” structured interviews where every applicant answers the same questions produce much more consistent results. This company, although I liked the job, was four rounds of corporate jargon and I still couldn’t really tell you what they were looking for. The actual job was great but the amount of fluffed up emails I had to write that sounded just like the interviews was telling.

What I’d tell each of these employers is the golf club had it right. Build your questions from job analysis, standardize the process, and decide what kind of answers you want. How a company interviews candidates is a direct preview of its operation.

Sources:

Chamorro-Premuzic, T., & Steinmetz, C. (2013). The perfect hire. Scientific American Mind, 24(3), 42–47.

Buckingham, M., & Coffman, C. (2016). First, break all the rules: What the world’s greatest managers do differently.Gallup Press.