/ . occup. Psychol. 1976,49, 171-176.

Printed in Great Britain

Effects of the non-verbal behaviour of interviewers on candidates' performance

A. KEENAN
Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh
Twenty-four neutral observers evaluated the performance of candidates in two mock selection interviews. Unknown to the observers, candidates received nonverbal approval from one interviewer and non-verbal disapproval from the other. Candidates were perceived as more comfortable and at ease in the approval interview and were also judged to have created a better impression. The results were discussed in terms of the possibility that an interviewer's non-verbal style may significantly influence the behaviour of the candidate he is trying to evaluate.

Until comparatively recently, research on the selection interview consisted mainly of attempts to estimate its reliability and validity. Reviews of this work suggest that the interview often lacks validity (Wagner, 1949; Mayfield, 1964; Ulrich & Trumbo, 1965). Following an influential series of studies reported by Webster (1964), research on the interview has increasingly focused on the processes involved when interviewers make decisions, rather than on the direct determination of validity coefficients (Wright, 1969; Ash & Kroeker, 1975). Presumably, the aim of many of these studies is to isolate some of the variables which affect the validity of the interview. Clearly the impression an interviewer forms of a candidate will be related to the information exchanged in the interview. While much of this would be at the verbal level, research on social interaction in non-interview situations demonstrates that many non-verbal behaviours also have communicative significance (Argyle, 1969; Mehrabian, 1969). Keenan & Wedderburn (1975) found that the non-verbal behaviour of interviewers affected the impressions candidates formed of them. In this laboratory study, candidates formed a more favourable impression of interviewers who emitted frequent non-verbal signals of approval compared with interviewers who gave frequent non-verbal signals indicative of disapproval. Having thus demonstrated that interviewer non-verbal behaviour could influence candidates' perceptions, the question remains as to whether the candidates' performance was also affected as a result of this experimental manipulation. To investigate this possibility a further investigation was carried out in which judges were asked to evaluate the performance of candidates in the approval and disapproval conditions of the original study.
METHOD

Full details of the procedures used to produce the videotapes which were the basic materials in the present investigation are given in a previous paper (Keenan & Wedderburn, 1975). Briefly, eight experimenters role-played the part of interviewers and 24 subjects acted as candidates. Each candidate was interviewed once by an interviewer who gave frequent non-verbal signals of approval, and once by a different interviewer who gave frequent non-verbal signals of disapproval. Non-verbal approval was operationalized as smiles, positive head nods and eye contact. Non-verbal disapproval was 171

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defined as frowns, head shaking and avoidance of eye contact. Although the verbal behaviour of the interviewers was held essentially constant by using the same standard interview protocol for every candidate, interviewers were allowed to deviate slightly from the protocol if they felt that this was absolutely necessary in order to maintain a natural interaction sequence. For example, the nature of some of the answers given by candidates occasionally required a follow-up question from the interviewer. The final 16 interviews between the eight interviewers and eight candidates were recorded on split-screen videotape. These tapes were used as materials for the present investigation. Since 12 tapes was regarded as an ideal number to use in the present experiment for practical reasons, interviews given by six interviewers to six candidates were selected by randomly excluding four tapes involving two interviewers and two candidates. Four of the six remaining interviewers were male, while all six candidates were male. There was an approval and a disapproval tape for each candidate, conducted by different interviewers on each occasion. Each interviewer conducted one approval and one disapproval interview. The order of presentation of conditions in the original study was counterbalanced across subjects. The 24 subjects who were to act as judges in the experiment were all undergraduate students of business. The sample consisted of 18 males and six females. There were three experimental periods, each of which was concerned with two different candidates. Each subject was allocated to one of these periods with approximately equal numbers in each (some subjects failed to turn up so that the final numbers were 6, 8 and 10 in each period). Judges observed both interviews for each of the two candidates in their period. One candidate was shown in the approval condition first, while the order of presentation was reversed for the other candidate. Subjects were not told the true nature of the original experiment. Instead, they were informed that they were taking part in a training evaluation exercise. It was explained that one of each candidate's interviews had taken place just prior to his participation in a course designed to improve his skills as an interviewee, while the other had taken place shortly after this course. As judges, they were required to evaluate the candidate's performance in each interview 'blind', i.e. without knowledge of the true temporal order of the interviews (this had supposedly been randomized by the experimenter). This would then be a measure of the effectiveness of the training. Judges observed the performance of the first candidate in both interviews with the interviewer's half of the screen obliterated so that visual cues from the interviewer could not interfere with their judgements. They then completed a forced-choice questionnaire in which they had to indicate which of a list of 14 categories of candidate performance differed between interviews. This procedure was repeated for the second candidate. When debriefing was carried out after all 24 subjects had completed the experiment, there was no indication that anyone suspected the purpose of the experiment.

Table 1 presents the judges' ratings of the performance of the six candidates in the approval and disapproval conditions. Each judge contributed two scores to each category, one for each candidate. Considering those occasions when observers perceived a difference in candidate performance from one interview to another, the question arises as to whether these

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differences are systematically related to the approval/disapproval conditions. If this were the case, then the distribution of responses across conditions should deviate significantly from the 50:50 expected by chance. It can be seen from Table 1 that this occurred for six out of the 14 categories of candidate behaviour listed. Thus, candidates were judged to be more relaxed, more comfortable and less ill at ease in the approval condition. They were seen as being more friendly towards the approving interviewer, and were also judged to be more talkative in the approval condition. With regard to the latter finding, although there was a tendency for candidates in the approval condition to be seen as more articulate, this difference was not statistically reliable. It is noteworthy that candidates in the approval condition were perceived as being more successful in creating a good impression. However, they were not seen as more competent in the approval interview.
DISCUSSION

This study has shown that the non-verbal style of interviewers in a mock selection interview can infiuence the behaviour of candidates as perceived by neutral observers. Non-verbal approval appears to result in a candidate being better able to create a good impression, perhaps because he feels more relaxed and at ease under these circumstances. However, the judges seemed to differentiate between the impression a candidate manages to create and his competence, since the latter was not significantly related to non-verbal approval. Perhaps competence was seen as something more than just performing well in the interview itself, unlike the item on creating a good impression. Although the observers in the present experiment thought that candidates talked more in the approval condition, the actual verbal output in terms of the percentage of total interview time candidates spent talking in the approval and disapproval conditions of the experiment was measured in the Keenan & Wedderburn (1975) study and no differences were found. Perhaps the observers assumed that 'talkative' referred to quality rather than quantity of verbal output in the present context! By comparing the results of the present investigation with those of the Keenan & Wedderburn (1975) experiment, it is possible to look at the relationship between a candidate's impressions when faced with approving and disapproving interviewers and his behaviour as perceived by neutral observers. This comparison is quite appropriate, since both studies involved the same experimental situation, and the candidates whose behaviotir was observed for this report were respondents in the Keenan & Wedderburn study. Although they were unaware that non-verbal approval was being manipulated in the first study, candidates stated that the approving interviewer made them feel more at ease. This seems to have been refiected in their own behaviour, judging from the present results. They also tended to feel that they had impressed the approving interviewer more, although the effect was not statistically reliable. However, the candidates were clearly seen to have created a better impression in the approval condition by the observers. Perhaps the candidate's emotional involvement in the situation made it more difficult for him to evaluate his own performance compared with the neutral observers. The candidates felt that the disapproving interviewer was less friendly. The observers' impressions suggest that candidates reacted to this by themselves behaving in a less friendly fashion towards the interviewer. The present results do not reveal how the observers formed their impressions of the candidates' performance under the two experimental conditions. One possibility is that candidates are better able to provide impressive answers to an interviewer's questions

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when they feel relaxed and at ease. The observers may also have utilized cues derived from differences in the non-verbal behaviour ofthe candidates in the two situations. Such a difference is to be expected in view ofthe finding of Rosenfeld (1967) that nonverbal approval is reciprocated in a dyadic encounter. Indeed, inspection of the videotapes used in the experiment suggested tentatively that this might have been the case in the present study. However, there is no way of telling from the present results which cues the judges actually used in forming their impressions since the candidates probably differed in both verbal and non-verbal behaviour across conditions. The fact that third parties evaluate a candidate's interview performance differently depending on the non-verbal behaviour of the interviewer does not necessarily mean that the interviewer himself would react in a similar fashion. While there seems no compelling reason to assume that interviewers would react differently from neutral observers in analogous situations to the present one, this can only be established by further empirical research. Because the interviews used in this study were highly structured, interviewer behaviour was necessarily less fiexible than would usually be the case in the typical real-life interview. Thus, although neither the candidates nor the observers reported that they noticed anything unusual about the behaviour of the interviewers, it is still necessary to be cautious about generalizing the findings of this study to real interviews until further research has been carried out. However, despite these limitations, the results suggest the possibility that an interviewer's non-verbal style (of which he is probably unaware) can infiuence the performance of a candidate in ways which create a good or bad impression on the interviewer himself. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks are due to Mr A. A. I. Wedderburn and to the students of the 1975 Industrial Psychology class at Heriot-Watt University for their assistance in carrying out this investigation. Mr Peter Walker kindly provided technical assistance in the preparation ofthe videotape recordings.

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REFERENCE ARGYLE, M . (1969). Social Interaction. London: Tavistock Publications. ASH, P . & KROEKER, L . P. (1975). Personnel selection, classification, and placement. Ann. Rev. Psychol. 26, 481-507. BRUNING, J. L. & KINTZ, B . L . (1968). Computational Handbook of Statistics. Glenview: Scott, KEENAN, A . & WEDDERBURN, A. A. I. (1975). Effects of the non-verbal behaviour of interviewers on candidates' impressions. / . occup. Psychol. 48,129-132. MAYHELD, E . C . (1964). The selection interview: A re-evaluation of published research. Personn. Psychol. 17,239-260. MEHRABIAN, A . (1969). Significance of posture and position in the communication of attitude and status relationships. Psychol. Bull. 71, 359-372. RosENFELD, H. M. (1967). Non-verbal reciprocation of approval: An experimental analysis. J. exp. Psychol. 3, 102-111. U L M C H , L . & TRUMBO, D . (1965). The selection interview since 1949. Psychol. Bull. 63, 100-116. WAGNER, R . (1949). The employment interview: A critical summary. Personn. Psychol. 2, 17-46. WEBSTER, E . C . (1964). Decision-making in the Employment Interview. Montreal: Eagle. WRIGHT, O . R . , Jr (1969). Summary of research on the selection interview since 1964. Personn. Psychol.22,3<)\-A\3. Received 28 Jutie 1976; revised version received 31 August 1976 Department of Business Organisation Heriot Watt University 31-35 Grassmarket Edinburgh E H I 2HT