Reflections on "The Apprentice"

I have been meaning to try and write an essay about The Apprentice, the TV show that has just reached the end of its fifth run in the UK. However, the pressures of the university exam period have somewhat scuppered that, so here are a few quick thoughts...

The one part of every series that really drives me crazy is the interviews just prior to the final of the show. These interviews have always seemed to have no purpose other than to make the candidates squirm as much as possible. But this time, the cat has been let out of the bag, when one of the interviewers appeared on The Apprentice - Your Fired and admitted that you would never interview like that in real life. In other words, they are just trying to make fun telly. However, even when interviewers are trying to do a sensible job, the psychological research indicates that interviews are a pretty dismal way of trying to predict how well someone will perform in any kind of future situation (and I don't mean just job interviews, but interviews for university places, parole board interviews, etc.). A recent enquiry to the mailing list of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making asked whether there was anything positive to be said for interviews. Nobody did have anything positive to say. Nonetheless, we all still use interviews, presumably for want of reliable evidence and because people still have misgivings about psychometric testing. Also, many interviewers will regard themselves as amateur psychologists, giving themselves a pat on the back for their ability to understand people and identify talent (see note below on overconfidence).

Something that happens on almost every episode of The Apprentice is the group brainstorming session, where the teams throw around ideas, a process which leads to the occasional tantrum or sulk as personalities clash and people don't get their own way. Again, there has been a lot of research into brainstorming and it points in one direction: It is more effective for people to generate ideas individually before engaging in evaluation than it is to do so in a group. Even when groups brainstorm properly (i.e. avoid poo-pooing ideas that are proposed), some people may be afraid of exposing their ideas to public scrutiny, they may be unable to get a productive train of thought going whilst listening to other people, they may forget what they were going to say because of what someone else is saying, they may slack off and let others do the work, or they may just match their individual level of productivity to what they perceive as the norm.

Some ways have been proposed to improve the effectiveness of brainstorming, such as having trained facilitators guide a session or alternating between private and group sessions. This also wouldn't be such good television, of course.

Finally, the thing I love about The Apprentice, and what makes it such compulsive viewing, is the incredible overconfidence of the candidates. Of course, you don't know to what extent the programme-makers gee them up to say the boastful things they do, but one of the great pleasures is watching people with apparently huge egos making a big mess of things. I fully appreciate that the tasks involved are difficult, that there is great time pressure, and so on, but that's all the more reason the candidates shouldn't be so cocky! Not that they will always admit to having made mistakes; the usual attitude, to quote the title of a book by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, is "Mistakes were made (but not by me)". And as this book title suggests, research into both experts and laypeople indicates not just a widespread tendency towards overconfidence, but also a tendency to believe that failures were somebody else's fault.

On the other hand, the candidates are perhaps in something of a dilemma. Admitting to having made a mistake is clearly seen as a risky thing to do. It's often hard for Sir Alan Sugar (in the UK version) to decide who should go, and admitting to a mistake obviously provides a clear reason for why you should be fired. At the same time, candidates are supposed to show that they can learn from experience! So, presumably the best strategy is to say that someone else made a mistake and you have learned from it...

Anyway, here's looking forward to the next series.