Social Anxiety and Evaluative Interviews

Samantha Horn, Peter Schwardmann and Egon Tripodi
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Samantha Horn: University of Chicago
Peter Schwardmann: Carnegie Mellon University

No 574, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: Evaluative social interactions are pervasive in labor markets. Inequality in these settings can arise not only from how individuals are treated or perform when evaluated, but from whether they enter evaluation at all. We study these margins in the context of social anxiety. In a controlled online experiment (N = 922), applicants decide whether to complete a live video interview that determines a monetary hiring bonus. We find that inequities associated with social anxiety are concentrated in participation rather than in performance or treatment. Socially anxious applicants are substantially less willing to interview, hold more pessimistic beliefs about being hired, and correctly anticipate a worse experience. Yet they perform no worse and are evaluated no differently. Interview experience does not attenuate the relative pessimism of socially anxious individuals, a pattern that is inconsistent with Bayesian updating under comparable signals. We use our rich audio-visual data and open-ended reflection texts to show that, instead, socially anxious applicants interpret similar interactions more negatively. We then provide evidence on organizational interventions aimed at closing social anxiety gaps. Finally, we show that social anxiety explains a meaningful share of inequalities commonly attributed to gender and social skill differences and is associated with significant earnings gaps in national data.

Keywords: social anxiety; job interviews; beliefs; mental health; discrimination; learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D83 I10 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-lma
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