Why can our emotions play tricks on us in job interviews?

Contrary to popular belief, our decision-making is far from being purely rational. Like, really far In fact, our emotions guide our choices far more than logic and reason. And often unconsciously.

I feel therefore I am, I feel therefore I act

Whatever their nature, our emotions serve as a signal to index the things that matter to us. The events that impact us and are valuable to us. That's why we remember much better situations that have a strong emotional taste - positive or negative. And this is normal because these are the events that are most important to us, the ones that gave us the most information about ourselves, and those that will influence us the most in the future.

Our emotions are not only useful to sort out our memories: they also prepare us for action. For instance, an emotion of fear related to a car running into us activates our muscles and our attention. The aim is to enable us to act quickly in the face of the situation. Basically, our emotions activate the necessary resources in our body and our brain so that we can adopt a behaviour adapted to the event we are living. And that's how we avoid the collision with the car that is coming at us. Quite useful, isn’t it?

Helping our brains to react more effectively

Our emotions allow us to act and remember at the same time. And this is no coincidence: thanks to emotional indexing, we learn to react better. The situations stored in our memory thanks to our emotions will serve as a reference to accelerate our future decisions and thus minimize the brain resources spent. Therefore, we always automatically look both ways before crossing the road.

To move faster, our brains take cognitive shortcuts - in scientific jargon, these are called heuristics. In most contexts, these shortcuts work very well and allow us to be more efficient. However, they also make us susceptible to bias and error.

The trap of cognitive bias

For example, if a candidate has many characteristics in common with a recruiter - the same passions, the same circles of acquaintances, the same neighbourhood of origin, or the same school... - he or she will automatically be assessed as more competent. Why? Because what is similar to us sounds emotionally more positive to us. This is called the attraction bias to similarity.

Another example is the familiarity effect. The more familiar we feel with a person or an entity, the more likely we are to perceive it positively, even if this familiarity is only related to a simple effect of exposure. For instance, a company that appears frequently in the media - not because of bad buzz but because of a strong employer branding - will be perceived more positively. It will therefore be more attractive to candidates.

But beware, biases can also entail negative consequences. As the name suggests, overgeneralization bias leads us to generalize a behaviour observed in a particular situation into a character trait. For example, a candidate who shows stress during recruitment may be stereotyped by the recruiter as an anxious person. However, the emotion of stress was appropriate to the context and is not a recurrent emotion in this candidate. That is why it is important to learn to control our emotions to counter the recruiter's bias. And our own.

Recognise your emotional triggers

Our automatic emotional responses are not inevitable. Automatic does not mean systematic but rather unconscious. Thus, by learning to exercise cognitive control over our emotions and by changing our past thought patterns, we can overcome our biases.

As always, getting to know ourselves is the key. We must therefore learn to identify what makes us overreact or misadjust. Those situations or elements of speech that are emotional triggers. For instance, a candidate with gaps in his/her CV who gets angry very quickly and loses his/her temper when a recruiter asks about it. This candidate automatically interprets the recruiter's question as criticism. He or she attributes a negative value to it, although the question was asked in a neutral way. Why does the candidate react this way? Because of past experiences and the criticism he/she may have received from people close to him/her or during other job interviews, this question has now become an emotional trigger for this candidate. A pity situation, since there are plenty of wavs to highlight a gap year.

We do not all have the same emotional triggers and they are not likely to remain the same throughout our lives. This is why it is important to regularly reflect on our past emotional experiences. Once we have learned to recognise our emotional triggers, we can train ourselves to react differently in emotionally-charged contexts, such as a job interview.