Encouraging interviewees to say “I don’t know” improves performance

I think part of this conditioning from taking tests in school. For twelve or more years of your life, in any situation where you are asked to demonstrate your knowledge, a null response is treated in the same negative fashion as an incorrect response, and getting outside help is disallowed. No wonder we try and guess, we've literally been trained for years that it's the best approach! Compounding that, an interview is the one situation in "the real world" that most resembles a testing situation from grade school, which will bring back all those bad habits.

Some commenters, and possibly the author, want this advice to extend to job interviews, but the reason an interviewer is pushing you to answer a question isn&#x27;t that they want you to be right or wrong. A good interviewer wants to get a look into how you think and how you approach a problem.<p>An even better interviewer will make that clear, by telling you &quot;there&#x27;s no trick here&quot;, &quot;I don&#x27;t know the answer myself, let&#x27;s see what we can figure out&quot;, or &quot;there&#x27;s no one right answer, I just want to know what you can see here&quot;. A trick I&#x27;ve employed a fair bit lately to get a reserved interviewee to start working with a question is &quot;What is the worst solution we could provide to attack this problem?&quot; I&#x27;ll even possibly go as far as offering my own horrible solution, and asking them where we fo to improve on this.<p>And I do mean worst. I haven&#x27;t met a candidate yet who can&#x27;t at least throw out ideas on how to improve my horrible solutions, and at that point the ball is rolling.

I have long suspected this to be true. That&#x27;s my argument against mandatory voting, because if people can choose not to vote, they can express they don&#x27;t know and hopefully leave the result on people who feel they do know.<p>However, it&#x27;s a bit unclear how this ties together with Dunning-Kruger effect (which is also used as an argument against democracy). The D-K effect would suggest that if you allow people to express doubt, the experts will doubt more, and overall performance will decrease.<p>It would be interesting if someone did a psychology experiment on that. (I am actually in favor of doing these kinds of demonstrations in high school, because it&#x27;s in my opinion important for people to understand how democratic voting works, for example the fact that voting won&#x27;t get you a simple average of the results - which is usually used as an argument against democracy.)

When reading the title, I assumed this was talking about job interviews, a much different type of interview. How do these ideas apply to job interviews? Is it a good idea for an interviewer in a job interview to encourage interviewees to say I don&#x27;t know, and should you be more ok with saying I don&#x27;t know and then elaborating in a job interview?

I&#x27;ll usually ask at least one question in an interview to see if the candidate <i>will</i> answer with &quot;I don&#x27;t know&quot; or ramble on incoherently making something up. Guess which I prefer.

One of my best technical interviews was from a lead engineer who simply asked more and more difficult questions until he found your limit (believe me, he knew more than anyone he would interview). His interest wasn&#x27;t in what you knew so much as how you reacted when you hit the limits of your knowledge.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of value in that approach. I don&#x27;t use it myself when interviewing people, but I do try to accomplish the same end.

Corollary: &quot;There&#x27;s no such thing as a stupid question&quot;, because you&#x27;re not afraid to be wrong. All creative and innovative people are like this, without exception, IMO. As Richard Feynman said in the title of an autobiography: &quot;What do you care what other people think?&quot;<p>Everybody wins when people leave their egos behind.

I&#x27;ve found that the ease with which someone answers &quot;I don&#x27;t know&quot; has a positive correlation with their wisdom in general. (Of course, if they answer &quot;I don&#x27;t know&quot; to everything, they probably just don&#x27;t care, and that&#x27;s a separate problem.)

One thing i always ask on that chat before the trivia questions, is what tech news sites the candidate read. And where he usually goes to were he wants to know the correct argument order of a function he does not use too often.<p>That usually gives me a better grasp of how he will solve a real world problem than the trivia questions.<p>But when hiring for teams that need to get specific work done fast, i do not underestimate the value of the trivia questions as it will show me the ramp up time to get that work done. Of course i apply that on top of the other means to get an idea if the candidate is a good fit overall.<p>There is no silver bullet for hiring.

The answers may get better, but don&#x27;t you want to find out which candidates are more likely to bluff when they&#x27;re wrong? The point of the interview isn&#x27;t for candidates to give you answers that are as correct as possible. If this were the case, you&#x27;d mail them a list of questions, and ask them to get back to you in a week. One goal of interviews is to find out how people behave when they don&#x27;t know. This is why I try to take people to the end of their knowledge, no matter where that end is.

In an interview i have never had a problem saying that I don&#x27;t know something or that I do know about something but can&#x27;t recall the specific answer.<p>I normally try and turn that scenario into a quick discussion where I hopefully let the interviewer display their vast knowledge and insight. Assuming the question is relevant I am always geniuenly interested in finding out about something I don&#x27;t know. Seeing that I am not being paid to take the interview I feel it is only fair that I get something out of it.

Nice study. I think it&#x27;s quite intuitive. When you are forced to spell you are force to say something. So by saying &quot;I don&#x27;t know&quot; it is natural to continue with &quot;I don&#x27;t know but I think&quot; and then it continues with more words.<p>Whereas to tell someone in advance &quot;don&#x27;t you dare to tell me I don&#x27;t know&quot; the person will just hold on to the thoughts until he or she has to spell that thought out (because he or she has to say something to get out of the misery).

This is obvious. See also the child abuse panic of the 80s, where kids were pressured to make up stories of abuse. And the general fact that eyewitness testimony is unreliable.

Being comfortable with saying &quot;I don&#x27;t know&quot; a lot is something I had to kind of train myself to do. It&#x27;s part of realizing that this is a truly enormous field that we&#x27;re in, and nobody could possibly know more than a fraction of it. Anyone who doesn&#x27;t say it much is either spending all of their time in a subset of the field that they know very well, or is throwing around bullshit, either from fear or bravado.

How about just ditching contrived interview questions because companies have no good science or data to establish the correlation with hiring the best people?<p>It seems past performance would be more reliable. What have you created and what was your role in it? Can you articulate your passion for the problems we are solving? Can you show that your colleagues respected your work and benefited from collaborating with you?

A good interview question should give space for exploration - it shouldn&#x27;t involve esoteric questions or things that are easily google-able. Good interview questions will give you insight into the candidate&#x27;s thought process, not what they&#x27;ve memorized beyond fundamentals. So the results of this study seem irrelevant.

It&#x27;s a nice idea, and it makes sense, but the sample size – 26 people per group, multiplied by 2 for two experiments – is too small to reach any definite conclusions.

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