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RESEARCH
ABSTRACT
Mood can influence behaviour and consumer choice in diverse settings. We found that such cognitive influences extend to candidate admission interviews at a Canadian medical school. We suggest that an awareness of this fallibility might lead to more reasonable medical school admission practices.
Admission offers to medical school are competitive and sometimes based on an interview. Psychology research suggests, however, that interviews are prone to subconscious biases from extraneous factors unrelated to the candidate.1 One of the most fundamental observations is that people interviewed on rainy days tend to receive lower ratings than people interviewed on sunny days.2 We studied whether this bias also extends to admission interviews at a large Canadian medical school.
We analyzed the results of consecutive medical school interviews at the University of Toronto between 2004 and 2009. We included all data available with no exclusions. Almost all interviews occurred in the early spring. Scores for...