Inflated Applicants: Attribution Errors in Performance Evaluation by Professionals

Abstract

When explaining others' behaviors, achievements, and failures, it is common for people to attribute too much influence to disposition and too little influence to structural and situational factors. We examine whether this tendency leads even experienced professionals to make systematic mistakes in their selection decisions, favoring alumni from academic institutions with high grade distributions and employees from forgiving business environments. We find that candidates benefiting from favorable situations are more likely to be admitted and promoted than their equivalently skilled peers. The results suggest that decision-makers take high nominal performance as evidence of high ability and do not discount it by the ease with which it was achieved. These results clarify our understanding of the correspondence bias using evidence from both archival studies and experiments with experienced professionals. We discuss implications for both admissions and personnel selection practices.

Individual Differences in Correspondence Bias: Measurement, Consequences, and Correction of Biased Interpersonal Attributions

“…Correspondent inferences would result in biased ratings of people benefitting from advantageous situations and easy tasks, and in the underestimation of the quality of people penalized by disadvantageous or difficult situations. This problem is particularly relevant in employee selection, assessment, and consideration for promotion (Swift et al 2013), as well as in school admissions where score and grade inflation are typically not sufficiently accounted for when evaluating prospective students (Moore et al 2010). Biased performance evaluations are not only potentially detrimental for organizations that select to hire individuals who perform poorly when hired for more challenging tasks than experienced in their previous employment, but they may also contribute to the persistence of inequality within organizations, as they may determine an unfair assignment of responsibility, rewards, and organizational resources.…”

“…Study 5A investigated the ability of the NED to predict the weight given to job difficulty when evaluating the performance and promotion-worthiness of employees. We used an experimental paradigm in which clear and quantified information about the situation was available, so participants could adjust their judgments appropriately (Swift et al 2013). An advantage of this paradigm is that it rules out the possibility that participants' neglect of situational information is simply a consequence of having incomplete information about situational constraints (Moore et al 2010).…”

Coauthorship Trends in the Field of Management: Facts and Perceptions

“…The increase in co-authoring is likely to persist to the extent that people neglect or underweight co-authorship inflation when they evaluate scholarly productivity. For example, prior studies show that people fail to adjust for grade inflation when they evaluate academic performance, leading them to more favorably evaluate individuals with higher grades, even though these grades reflect semi-arbitrary institutional norms rather than individual ability (Moore, Swift, Sharek, & Gino, 2010;Swift, Moore, Sharek, & Gino, 2013).…”

Nudge: Manager as Choice Architect

“…But more generally self-assessments and portrayals of the self tend to be inflated, which of course can further be compounded in recruiting situations where individuals have every incentive to portray their best possible self (cf. Swift et al, 2013). Thus other relevant biases related to prospective employees include a tendency toward unwarranted over-confidence (Moore & Healy, 2008) or a selfserving bias where any negative information about one's self is rejected (Campbell & Sedikes, 1999) as well as a more general egocentric bias (Ross & Sicoly, 1979).…”