 Tim Wilson talks about this idea of sort of inside information and you can imagine that information that you've experienced firsthand seems like it's more relevant To the sort of decisions that you that you make so you could take an example like If you're trying to decide whether to invest money in a bakery say so you have bakery a and bakery b But you go into bakery a Right and you're talking to the employees. You're sampling the goods, right? You talk to the manager about Kind of their business plan and everything else But you don't do that for bakery B, right bakery B. You just read about in a newspaper some report or something Now when it comes to investing money in the two you feel more confident with a right than you would with B But you probably when you're actually tallying the results of doing that sort of Investment you probably wouldn't be any better with a than B. If anything you're That sort of inside personal information that you have with a might actually hurt you in the end because it feels like It's something that you have privileged access to so it's probably going to give you a Misinformation about about that about that bakery and about the investment that you're about to make the same holds for job interviews, right? Absolutely, so we think we can spend 10 minutes with a person will be able to predict Exactly what kind of employee they'll be so oh, yeah that she was very confident I think she'll be able to lead a team very well or I'm not so sure about her You know she was she was unsure of yourself, and I don't think she's the best fit for this organization But the data say that that interviews are entirely Non-predictive of the performance of job performance. That's right In fact, there was been a there was we keep talking about these giant analyses. There was one done by I think it was Frank Schmidt and Jack Hunter and they They looked at I think it was 32,000 employees across every job that you can imagine from farmers to musicians to sales people and so on and They actually tried to figure out so that they did they did the experiment to see how people would predict that people would do The employees would do in a particular job and how they actually did after the fact on the basis of these interviews and they found that Pretty much these standard interviews were almost completely useless I mean, I think it accounted for what's called 8% of the variance to kind of put that in in lay terms It means that for example if you had if you placed your 100 employees on a on a scale from the best to the worst Right, and then you actually saw how they performed and then ranked them again from the best to the worst You would be right on about eight of those people in putting them in the correct spot Out of a hundred employees. So that's not really good now Remember the kind of the point of this episode is that weren't we don't really have much insight into our own behavior these Sort of experiments and this this topic means that we're not very good at predicting other people's behavior as well And in fact, we're not much better as Richard Nisbet said we're not much better at Predicting our own behavior Compared to other people's behavior. The reason that interviews are so bad I think is because of something called the confirmation bias, right? We see what we expect to see so when you're interviewing a Job applicant you've read their CV. You've read their their their resume You have a pretty good idea of whether you like the person or not before they even enter the room Then when they enter the room you ask them questions the thing you ask them Is kind of going to be consistent with what your expectations are so you know the question might be are you a strong leader? Exactly. So are you a strong leader? Are you or you only ask them about the things that will confirm your beliefs? So the very questions that you ask are only going to be ones that make them look better That they might respond well to and that's why these sort of standard interviews are so bad But what's better is something called a structured interview And so if you ask every single applicant that comes in the door exactly the same things Then it gets a little better in terms of predicting their behavior in terms of future performance better would be to have This is worked by a colleague of mine Kevin Eva and what he's doing is interviewing Medical school applicants who are already you know exceptionally good because by virtue of applying for medical school But what they found is that if they asked people in Different rooms in different scenarios you have different people that are asking these same people different things completely independent of one another Then that is even better than a structured interview So the same person asking this you have different people asking Very structured sorts of questions and that even gets you a little bit further the sort of Stattered interview that we're used to that most of us have had kind of throughout our careers is virtually Useless I think I think it's also true that the best predictor of future behavior could be the past behavior So yes, you could do a structured interview, but even better might be to get Sort of standard measures of people's performance in the past So whether you're trying to select a job applicant or even a roommate how in the past have they paid their rent on time in the past have they Had good good performance evaluations and good outcomes things that they that that it's difficult to fake or control It seems that that those things that those standard measures over a long period of time are much better at predicting Job performance or behavior in the future absolutely and it's not just So it's these sort of long-term predictors as you said so for example if in University It would be GPA or even high school, right? So these grades that you've accumulated over a period of four years It's hard to fake that right on the other hand if you have say a final exam one high stakes testing is what they call it So if you have one exam one critical exam like the graduate record examination or your LSATs or MCATs Or you know all of these different sort of standardized exams Those really aren't good predictors because you could be sick that day You didn't have much sleep. You had a bunch of things kind of working against you This is the idea of what's called multiple independent error factors So at any given moment you have things working for you and things working against you. So yep I missed my alarm. I missed the bus. I Didn't eat breakfast all of these kind of things that just kind of happen randomly Kind of work against you and it kind of produces the worst test taking your neighbors were up the night before and they kept you up and and You just studied all the wrong things it seems like and that kind of it works in the other way as well I mean in some cases everything's gonna work for you, right? So you had you know just the best sleep you had the best meal you studied just the right things and but again in every circumstance it's When you take sort of long-term behavior Then it's very unlikely that everything's gonna work for you or work against you all at once Right because there are many times for these things to kind of rear their heads But on a one trial task like a single test Then yeah, you're at the whim of all sorts of things that could Which is why it's not a very good predictor of future performance What do you think the upshot is then if we don't have much of an insight into our own behavior or the behavior of others Well, the the title of the of this episode is called know-thyself and I think that's fairly apt and one of the other titles that we covered is the title of Tim Wilson's book called Strangers to Ourselves and I think you're gonna see this theme sort of playing out throughout the entire course and We'll see in the next episode for example that We have to resolve this right if we if we can't if we have no insight into our own behavior into our into Why we do the things that we do and we saw in the last episode that The way that the world works may not be exactly as it seems right so Seeing hearing remembering all involve considerable knowledge and so on and and we're kind of being swayed by Any sort of factors whatsoever whether media reports and everything else That's a problem right so what are we gonna do about that? I mean if if we don't even know when it's happening and these things are actually operating then then what right? And I think we can get I think we can get there, but it's gonna take a little bit of work