APPLIED MICRO: Social Anxiety and Evaluative Interviews; Dr Egon Tripodi (Hertie School)

As social skills command increasing premia in labor markets, fear and avoidance of social interactions are poised to become a growing source of inequality. We develop a controlled experimental setting to understand how social anxiety undermines those who suffer from it. Job applicants first complete an individual task before taking part in an interview in which an interviewer aims to select applicants who solved at least 60 percent of the task correctly. We show that people who suffer from social anxiety exhibit relative pessimism about their chances of being recruited, mirrored in how competent and likable they expect to appear to interviewers. This is despite the fact that socially anxious applicants do not perform worse, and they are aware of that. Although interviewers correctly perceive that socially anxious applicants are not less capable and do not discriminate against them in hiring decisions, socially anxious individuals remain pessimistic about how they are perceived even after the interview. Taken together, these findings suggest that beliefs about the impressions we make on others put socially anxious people at a disadvantage, and that exposure to evaluative situations alone is not sufficient to overcome fear and avoidance.