You Have More Influence Than You Think by Vanessa Bohns

Author:Vanessa Bohns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

This is good news because most of us want to know more about the personal lives of our co-workers and acquaintances. And long-standing research on self-disclosure and relationship closeness suggests that asking personal questions will prompt someone else to ask personal questions in return, leading to a cycle of mutual disclosure, which ultimately brings people closer together and leads to richer, more satisfying relationships.39

This research seems to suggest that we should ask people more personal questions, not less. And, in fact, that may be true if our goal is to build a closer community with the people around us. However, when our goal is to be an objective arbiter of a consequential outcome, the takeaway is a little more complicated than that. As with so many of the findings in this book, the underestimated power we have to elicit a particular response from someone else should be used more in some contexts, but less in others.

Let’s return to the context of job interviews. As a means of making small talk, many of us—particularly those of us who are put in the position of conducting a job interview with no formal human resources training—will slip up and ask about someone’s kids or what their spouse does. And job candidates, more often than not, will answer these questions candidly. In part, as we just saw, this is because people are often quite happy to talk about their personal lives with others. Personal disclosure is a means of establishing rapport and closeness, and a non-negligible part of interviewing. But research shows that interviewees may also answer personal questions even when they don’t feel comfortable doing so for the same reasons we’ve discussed previously. We are loath to offend others—particularly someone who controls an outcome as important as a potential job offer—and refusing to answer a question feels like a surefire way to insinuate an interviewer’s insensitivity for asking it in the first place. It’s not exactly the kind of rapport most interviewees hope to establish with an interviewer.

Thus, most people do indeed agree to answer personal questions in interviews, even if it means disclosing information about their personal lives they would otherwise like to keep private. In a study by organizational behavior researchers Catherine Shea, Sunita Sah, and Ashley Martin, they found that 83% of interviewees felt obligated to answer personal questions.40

And although interviewers in this study were more likely to view these questions as a helpful means of getting to know a candidate, interviewees were more likely to view them as discriminatory. Ultimately, Shea and colleagues found, this has negative consequences for both interviewees and employers. Not surprisingly, based on the research reviewed earlier, interviewees who were asked questions about their marital and family status were less likely to be offered the job. And as for the candidates who were offered the job? It turns out they were less likely to take it. Similarly, in the survey of medical residency applicants described earlier, a sizable percentage of applicants who were asked this

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.