Similar To Me

I have been interviewing candidates for a job this week. Given that I work within talent acquisition, my team is pretty highly aware of the complexities involved in hiring. Your average hiring manager has to constantly think through whether their assessments are influenced by applicants' attractiveness (beauty bias), success within irrelevant areas (halo effect) or first impressions (primacy effect). This article from Science Careers surveys these various biases very well.

While spouses have been known to joke that they "staffed for their weaknesses," I will admit that choosing a spouse is far different than choosing a new team member. Still, I would argue that one of the biases highlighted in this article uniquely affects both who we marry and how we relate afterwards. The "Similar To Me" effect refers to a well-researched tendency of interviewers and supervisors to favor those individuals who are similar to them. Put simply, people are attracted to candidates with similar senses of humor, similar conversational styles, even similar physical appearances.

As an illustration, an old friend of mine once worked for someone who went beyond simply falling prey to the Similar To Me effect...she actually embraced it with vigor. Not only did she learn her Myers Briggs personality type, but she also determined that her personality type was what allowed her to thrive. She thought to herself, "Wouldn't it be great if everyone here saw things and reacted to things just like me?" So she started administering the Myers Briggs test to every job applicant or transfer candidate, and she actively pursued people with the same personality type. Think about that for a moment: this manager actually crafted an entire department that was predisposed to certain approaches and fundamentally struggled with certain tasks. The same strengths. The same blind spots. Not exactly a team; more like the premise for a reality TV show.

Now, it's pretty easy to see this effect's impact on non-professional relationships too. While opposites definitely attract, people also find themselves drawn towards individuals who remind them of...well...themselves. Just think about dating websites: scores of people searching for possible matches and starting with those folks who have similar interests and perspectives. But this effect impacts long-term relationships long after the dating phase has ended. Once that hiring manager staffed an entire department with "mini-me's," she also had to manage them and lead them. Similarly, couples do not stop seeking out similarities once they pair off; they also attempt to persuade their partners to become even more similar to them. I speak from experience. On a weekly basis, I convince myself (although not my wife) that life would be far easier if we both understood how important it is to keep books organized by genre or clear out old television programs from the DVR. Right? Well, maybe.

Similarities are pretty important, I'll admit. If my lovely bride hated reading or ate only raw foods or watched Fox News, we would have encountered some minor turbulence along the way. But imagine if we truly succeeded in marrying people just like us. That would mean my wife was also apt to conveniently overlook house projects and interrupt during conversations. To be fair, we would also want to see the same movies and eat pizza every night. So there are some pros and cons here. Regardless, life would be a little less interesting. Complete similarity may be something we're biased towards, but sometimes our natural biases are misguided.

Remember that boss I mentioned earlier? Well, it turned out she had been scoring those Myers Briggs Type Indicators completely wrong. She hired an entire team of people that were completely opposite of her. Funny, right? One thing's for sure: chasing similarity isn't always a good thing.

- Cliff (aka The Husband)