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Title: Social Anxiety and Evaluative Interviews, with Samantha Horn and Egon Tripodi

As social skills command ever rising labor-market returns, fear and avoidance of social interactions are poised to become an increasingly important source of inequality. We study how social anxiety shapes behavior and beliefs in evaluative interviews using a controlled online experiment (N = 922). Participants complete a performance task and then take part in a face-to-face interview with an evaluator attempting to hire high performers. Socially anxious individuals disproportionately avoid interviewing and hold significantly more pessimistic beliefs about how competent, likable, and hirable they will appear. This pessimism is unfounded: socially anxious individuals perform just as well as others in the interview. Yet the experience of a non-discriminatory interview does not correct their pessimism, nor does random assignment to a particularly warm or non-judgmental interviewer. Social anxiety is a strong and distinct predictor of avoidance and pessimism, even relative to depression, generalized anxiety, personality measures, and social-skill indices commonly used in labor economics. Lowering the cost of interviewing increases the share of socially anxious applicants, highlighting the removal of frictions as a promising intervention point.