Purpose Increased use of past behavior questions makes it important to understand applicants' responses. Past behavior questions are designed to elicit stories from applicants. Four research questions were addressed: How do applicants respond to past behavior questions, in particular, how frequent are stories? When applicants produce stories, what narrative elements do they contain? Is story production related to applicants' characteristics? Do responses affect interview outcomes? Design/Methodology/Approach Using a database of 62 real job interviews, the prevalence of five types of applicants' response to past behavior questions were analyzed: story, pseudo-story, exemplification, value/opinion, and self-description. We also coded the narrative content of stories, distinguishing between situations, tasks/actions, and results. We analyzed relations between applicant characteristics (gender, age, personality, self-reported communication and persuasion skills, general mental ability) and response type. We used hierarchical multiple regression to predict hiring recommendations from response type. Findings Stories were only produced 23 % of the time. Stories featured more narrative elements related to situations than tasks, actions, or results. General mental ability and conscientiousness affected response types, and men produced more stories than women. There were differences in the storytelling rate according to the type of competency. Stories and pseudo-stories increased hiring recommendations, and self-descriptions decreased them.Originality/Value Behavioral interviews may not be conducive to storytelling. Recruiters respond positively to narrative responses. More research is needed on storytelling in the selection interview, and recruiters and applicants might need training on how to encourage and tell accurate and representative stories.

Summary Predators exert a strong selective force on the ecosystems in which they exist, thereby altering the structure of ecological communities and leading to the evolution of prey defences. However, how interspecific differences in defence ability affect habitat partitioning amongst competing prey species remains unresolved. We examined how prey defences affect species distribution in a natural ecosystem: the aquatic food web within Neotropical bromeliads. We first related differences in prey (mosquito) density to the presence and absence of predatory damselfly larvae. We then quantified behavioural responses to predators in the two most abundant mosquito species, and the effects of these behaviours on predator consumption rates. In the absence of damselflies, Wyeomyia was the most abundant mosquito genus in natural bromeliads. However, Wyeomyia numbers were reduced in the presence of damselflies. Numbers of the genus Culex increased with bromeliad size irrespective of the presence of damselflies. As a result of the differing effects of plant size and damselflies on the two genera of mosquito larvae, Culex were more numerous in large bromeliads containing damselflies. The most abundant Culex species, Culex jenningsi, had two kinds of behavioural defences: reduced movement and increased time at the water surface. These defences reduced damselfly attack rate on C. jenningsi, but not handling time. Consequently, consumption rate was reduced at all but the highest prey densities, altering the damselfly's functional response. Inducible defences were not seen in the most abundant Wyeomyia species, Wyeomyia abebela, and pre‐exposure to predation risk did not reduce predation on this species. Inducible behavioural defences, and the associated reductions in predation rate, evidently allow C. jenningsi to coexist with predators at a higher density than W. abebela. As predation risk is non‐randomly distributed amongst bromeliads, divergence between mosquito species in their response to predation may contribute to the coexistence of a number of mosquito species across the landscape.

Many members of the family Bromeliacae are able to adopt epiphytic lifestyles and colonize trees throughout the Neotropics. Bromeliacae do not extract nutrients from their hosts and confer relatively minor costs on their host plants. We suggest that bromeliads, however, may benefit their hosts by providing habitat for predators of host plant herbivores. We report a correlation between bromeliad presence and a reduction in herbivore damage in orange trees, an effect that is increased when bromeliads are colonized by ants. Our results may have important implications for agricultural systems in the Neotropics, where bromeliads are often removed in the belief they are parasitic. We instead demonstrate that bromeliads may impart a benefit to their hosts, and speculate that under particular circumstances they may be part of a three-species mutualism.Abstract in Spanish is available in the online version of this article.

Social network analysis has been postulated as a tool to study potential pathogen transmission in wildlife but is resource‐intensive to quantify. Networks based on bacterial genotypes have been proposed as a cost‐effective method for estimating social or transmission network based on the assumption that individuals in close contact will share commensal bacteria. However, the use of network analysis to study wild populations requires critical evaluation of the assumptions and parameters these models are founded on. We test (a) whether networks of commensal bacterial sharing are related to hosts’ social associations and hence could act as a proxy for estimating transmission networks, (b) how the parameters chosen to define host associations and delineate bacterial genotypes impact inference and (c) whether these relationships change across time. We use stochastic simulations to evaluate how uncertainty in parameter choice affects network structure. We focused on a well‐studied population of eastern grey kangaroos (Macropus giganteus), from Sundown National Park, Australia. Using natural markings, each individual was identified and its associations with other kangaroos recorded through direct field observations over 2 years to construct social networks. Faecal samples were collected, Escherichia coli was cultured and genotyped using BOX‐PCR, and bacterial networks were constructed. Two individuals were connected in the bacterial network if they shared at least one E. coli genotype. We determined the capacity of bacterial networks to predict the observed social network structure in each year. We found little support for a relationship between social association and dyadic commensal bacterial similarity. Thresholds to determine host associations and similarity cut‐off values used to define E. coli genotypes had important ramifications for inferring links between individuals. In fact, we found that inferences can show opposite patterns based on the chosen thresholds. Moreover, no similarity in overall bacterial network structure was detected between years. Although empirical disease transmission data are often unavailable in wildlife populations, both bacterial networks and social networks have limitations in representing the mode of transmission of a pathogen. Our results suggest that caution is needed when designing such studies and interpreting results.