On winnowing: The impact of scarcity on allocators' evaluations of candidates for a resource

Abstract

It was hypothesized that allocators unwittingly forge a relation between the availability of a resource and the worthiness of the applicants for that resource. In a simulation of an academic job search, graduate students were instructed to hire either 2 or 6 of 12 excellent candidates. Subjects spoke into a tape recordor reporting their initial reactions to each of the candidate's vitae, then made their hiring decisions, and rated the desirability of each of the candidates. Next, they were told they could now hire more of the applicants if they wished to do so. In a control condition, subjects were treated identically to experimental subjects in all aspects of the procedure but one--they did not anticipate and were not required to make hiring decisions. Instead, they rank ordered the applicants in terms of quality with the knowledge that "their department" wished to hire either 2 or 6 people. As hypothesized, subjects anticipating 2 appointments made fewer positive comments about the candidates on the audiotapes than did those anticipating 6 appointments; subjects in the experimental condition evaluated the candidates they hired more favorably than subjects in the control condition evaluated their own top-ranked candidates; subjects who were initially required to hire 2 candidates continued to employ fewer applicants than those who initially hired 6 when external hiring constraints were removed. The implications of the data for the review process in academic psychology journals were discussed.