The‎ Influence of Attraction Effect on Hiring Decisions: Does Experience Matters?‎

Abstract

Evidence suggests that the contextual factor of attraction effects such as decoy and phantom candidates affect the task of choosing a single job candidate from a small set of comparable finalists. Nevertheless, the number of studies of the attraction effect on the job-finalist choice is relatively small and bound to methodological gaps (i.e., vulnerable to invariant sample and individuals’ differences). The present study examined the influence of decoy and phantom candidates on job-finalist choice as well as differences of such influence based on participants’ background. By using a within-subject, experimental design, 98 participants of different backgrounds (i.e., personnel selection workers and personnel selection students) were recruited to play the roles of hiring managers in three simulated employee selection scenarios. Results from McNemar’s chi-square revealed the following: (i) participants tend to choose the target candidate in decoy condition over control condition, (ii) participants tend to choose the target candidate in phantom condition over control condition and (iii) no difference in the number of participants who chose the target candidate in decoy and phantom conditions. Besides, results from further analysis on participants’ backgrounds showed: (i) the effect of a decoy candidate is significant among students but not among workers (ii) the effect of phantom candidate is not significant among both workers and students, and (iii) the difference between the effects of decoy and phantom candidates is significant among workers but not among students. The implications of these findings were discussed, and recommendations for future research are provided.