A lot of organizations do behavioral interviews, where they’re backward looking and asking about your history, what you’ve accomplished, what challenges you’ve overcome. And those don’t turn out to be very effective if you look at the evidence, because they suffer from an apples-and-oranges problem: it’s very hard to compare two people’s work histories.
Instead, what you want to do is ask, “What would you do in a situation like this,” and give everybody the same situation. The problem is, no one wants to admit, “I would be a taker here.” But there’s an easy way around this, which is, instead of asking “What would you do?” you ask people to predict what other people would do.
Most of us tend to project our own motivations onto other people. If you give me a scenario where it’s not clear whether the appropriate behavior is giving, taking, or matching, what I’ll tend to do when predicting others’ behavior is ask, “Well, what would I do in this situation?” And then you get their honest opinion. Integrity-test research, for example, shows that the higher my estimate that other people will be thieves, the greater the odds that I myself am a thief.
Author: Adam Grant
Source: McKinsey Quarterly
Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior
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