Department of Personnel management, work and organizational psychology
Abstract
The abundance of research on interview discrimination has resulted in the conventional wisdom that stigmatizing applicant characteristics elicit biased interview judgments. Although this finding is robust across a wide variety of stigmatized groups, and despite the social importance of this effect, currently we lack understanding of the processes driving these biased decisions. The present dissertation contributes to the literature on personnel selection by investigating the mechanisms that drive bias in the job interviewer’s decision-making process. This dissertation starts by presenting an overview of the current understanding of interview bias, and highlights the challenges that need to be addressed by future research. Next, building on research from social- and cognitive psychology, a dual-process framework of interview bias is presented. Propositions from this framework will guide the present dissertation and will be investigated in several empirical studies. The introduction concludes with an overview of the chapters and empirical studies of this dissertation
