Good luck to everyone who’s being interviewed at the APA this week.

In some ways it’s a weird, weird process – not obviously geared to producing good results, and clearly torture for some participants. I suppose I can imagine someone arguing that the ability to get through it is a sign that a candidate has some of the qualities they want in a colleague (organisational skills, ability to push on and keep working under stressful conditions, ability to cope with difficult people and formal situations etc.), but when I was reading Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained recently, and he described a coming of age ceremony in which adolescent boys are subjected to a terrifying ritual in which their deaths are faked (they are held underwater and it is made to look as if a spear is plunged into their bellies) before they are taken away from the village by the older men and basically hazed for an extended period of time, I couldn’t help being reminded of the APA. Good luck keeping your heads, guys.

(N.B. Just to clarify, I haven’t actually heard any stories about APA interviews involving water-boarding. And there is a rumour that girls are sometimes interviewed too.)