Earlier this week, I suggested that most people show up to an interview experiencing “cognitive strain.” Unless you can help a person migrate to a place of cognitive ease, they’ll have a difficult time hearing and engaging most of what you’re trying to communicate. If you didn't read the first article in this discussion, you may want to catch up before trying to digest today’s topic.
How do you get someone from a state of cognitive strain to a place of cognitive ease? Daniel Kahneman spends several chapters in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, addressing this topic.
Part of the answer to the question can be summed up in this diagram:
The items listed on the right side are the feelings we want
the candidate to have when they leave the interview. These traits are the natural results of feeling cognitive ease.
Some of the causes that produce cognitive ease are listed on the left side. As you might suspect, if you can become proficient at influencing the items on the left (by the way, this is not a complete list—there are many more elements), candidates will start experiencing something remarkable at your interviews.
As I mentioned earlier, Kahneman spends several chapters explaining and citing research for these causes. Not all of these would relate to interviewing (although a surprising number do apply), so we’ll just explore “related experience” today. If you have an interest in learning more, you can delve into this topic by picking up a copy of his book.
Here is a simple question that Dr. Kahneman often asks his audiences:
“How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?
The number of people who detect what was wrong with this question is so small that it has been dubbed the Moses illusion. Moses took no animals into the ark; Noah did.
The idea of animals going into the ark sets up a biblical context, and Moses is not abnormal in that context. You did not positively expect him, but the mention of his name is not surprising. It also helps that Moses and Noah have the same vowel sound and number of syllables.
As with triads that produce cognitive ease, you unconsciously detect associative coherence between Moses and ‘ark’ and so quickly accept the question.”
By default, the human mind wants to maintain (or get to) a state of System 1 thinking. One of the ways it maintains this state is to look for related experiences. When you heard just a few words (animals and ark), it quickly pulled a story from memory that allowed you to answer the question without leaving a state of cognitive ease.
The error you made (and we all make) illustrates how quickly the mind retrieves, depends upon, and desires related experiences.
Let’s suppose I ask a different question: How many chickens did Eric take to the marina?
Of course, you quickly get frozen with this question. Who’s Eric? Why does he have chickens? Is he taking the chickens to a boat, or is there a restaurant near the marina? And, so on. Your mind does not even consider the first part of the question—how many chickens are there?
In the first question, none of the background mattered because the “related experience” filled in the context.
Side note: The relationship between related experience and cognitive ease is leveraged frequently by companies such as Geico during their marketing campaigns. Next time you see or hear a Geico commercial, see if you can detect it.
What does this have to do with interviewing?
A “related experience” is one of the best pathways to get a candidate to a state of cognitive ease during an interview.
The point is not to deceive anyone in the interview process (we make the assumption that you’re offering the person something that will be advantageous for his or her career), but instead allow them to feel good about you and your organization and trust the things you’re communicating.
How do you find related experiences? Here are two sources you can use immediately:
Pop culture. How many times have you been in a meeting and someone says…"this is like the TV show Survivor. Someone is going to get voted off the island." This is a related experience. Find two or three references in pop culture that would relate to the points you commonly make during and interview.
The candidate’s own experiences. If you spend time (the first 20 to 30 minutes of the interview) drawing out and listening to the candidate’s story, you’ll have plenty of material to draw upon to find related experiences. Restating the candidate’s own experiences and then relating it to the realities of working in your office is very powerful.
If you can master the concepts of related experience and cognitive ease, you will take your interview skills to a whole new level. You’ll not only reap the rewards of hiring more agents, but you’ll also experience some cognitive ease for yourself!
Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.
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