At the end of this post I made a comment about how the lazy thinking that allows otherwise intelligent people to make ‘The Hitler Defense’ is a dangerous path that leads people to believe being technically right is a sufficient justification for saying the right thing. That comment was based on an experience from a few years ago that I’m sharing publicly for the first time today.
This moment happened on a Friday in July 2015. It was just a few days after my mom had died. The way things worked out, we ended up having a wake on Wednesday but we did not have the funeral until the following Monday. This created an unusual five-day gap between wake and funeral that my company’s bereavement policy was ill equipped to navigate. Although my boss had clarified his stance on the policy (it was the verbal equivalent of printing it out and blowing his nose with it) I decided to come into work on Friday anyway in order to take care of a couple of things.
The biggest item on the agenda was a job interview. At the time, this was my most important project. I had just become the hiring manager and had invested significant time and energy into perfecting our hiring process. I felt that if we ran the right process, we could position ourselves to build on an already strong team in the coming year. As it happened on this particular Friday, we were due to interview a very promising candidate and I wanted to be involved in the interview if at all possible.
The candidate arrived for the interview and we assembled for the first of three interview rounds. Two analysts in my team accompanied me in the first group. We opened with some brief chatter before starting the interview. A few minutes into the conversation, I asked the candidate – who was just a year out of school with an undergraduate economics degree – if he had found ways to apply his education to any aspect of his life outside of work and, if so, to describe how he’d done so.
His response started off promisingly. He talked about the way economists study incentives and described how understanding these mechanisms could be used to explain any kind of behavior. So far, so good. But then he lost us when he said that he’d recently been describing the same concept to a friend and they’d ended up calculating the exact dollar total they would require before shooting their own mothers.
(Editor’s note: whoops!)
I don’t remember exactly what I said or did in immediate response. I do remember almost laughing out loud. It was kind of funny, in a ‘sitcom just became real life’ kind of way, and I remember feeling bad for our candidate’s poor timing. I sort of recall the air going out of the room a little bit (although I’m not entirely sure) but my team made no direct reference to the comment. I took in the response, asked the next question, and we all moved on. Eventually, we finished up with the interview and left the room.
I’ve thought a lot about that answer over the past couple of years. What compelled our candidate to describe that conversation? I suppose he thought that in order to get a job, he couldn’t just settle for the bronze, he had to go for the gold, and though he went home empty-handed I must respect him for that approach. It was just bad luck for him that I happened to be there in the room when he made his attempt – maybe if he’d interviewed with us a year prior, we would have glossed over the comment and found a reason to hire him.
But a broader line of thinking brings me back to a central idea from my original post about The Hitler Defense – couldn’t he have just come up with a better example? Why not talk about, say, how he would require a million bucks to eat a can of worms? I think the reason this candidate failed is because he prioritized being technically right ahead of all other considerations. Eventually, being right all the time becomes a form of intellectual sloth and lazy thinkers often fail to weigh subtler considerations like tact and empathy.
A slothful thinker would consider the ‘mother shooting’ example and feel good about it because it was technically accurate. But a thinker in better shape would quickly recognize that such an example among strangers might cause unintended problems. A good thinker in that situation would calculate the costs and the payoffs, consider all reasonable alternatives, and conclude that in a world where we all come from a lady perhaps a different approach was a better plan. A measured approach isn’t just good advice for job interviews or defending a point through metaphor – it’s the essence of working together and underscores the primary difference between life as a student and life as a professional.
