Emotional Contagion: The Interview Hack That Could Make All the Difference

Recruiters aren’t just evaluating your answers. They’re reading your attitude, your personality, and your vibe from the moment you walk in, and that assessment can start working against you within seconds. Walk in with body language that reads as flat, tense, or off, and you can set off a chain reaction that wrecks your chances at an Assessment Day or Final Interview before you’ve said very much at all.

Here’s why that happens.

Emotions Are Contagious, Literally

This is where emotional contagion comes in: the well-documented tendency for one person’s emotions and behaviour to spread to the people around them, often without either person noticing it’s happening. It’s why a tense room feels tense to everyone in it, and why one confident, relaxed person can visibly lift the mood of a group.

Recruiters are picking up on this constantly. Try putting yourself in the recruiter’s shoes for a second. You see a candidate standing quietly in the corner, their face sullen, not engaging with anyone around them. The candidate isn’t in a bad mood. They’re just nervous and trying hard to focus on being as professional as possible.

But their body language is giving off all the wrong signals, especially for a job that requires an outgoing, high-energy personality. And once a recruiter has picked up on a negative vibe, there’s a natural human tendency to notice more of it. A slightly hesitant answer gets read as a bigger red flag than it would if the room had started out warm and relaxed. This isn’t the recruiter being unfair. It’s confirmation bias, and everyone does it.

And once a recruiter has noticed a vibe they don’t like, it doesn’t just change how they read you. It can actually start to affect their own attitude and behaviour too, which is where things can spiral.

The Betari Box

There’s a well-known model in workplace psychology called the Betari Box, and it explains why this can spiral in either direction. Here’s how it works:

• Your attitude → shapes your behaviour
• Your behaviour → affects the other person’s attitude
• Their attitude → shapes their behaviour
• Their behaviour → affects your attitude

And round it goes again.

Left unchecked, that loop can drag both people into a worse and worse state. But it works just as well in the other direction. Walk in projecting warmth and calm, and you give the recruiter something positive to respond to. That positive response feeds back to you, and the whole exchange lifts rather than drags.

Projecting the Right Emotions

This doesn’t mean you have to fake a personality. But it does mean being acutely aware of your body language and making a concerted effort to be warm, welcoming, and approachable from the outset and throughout the entire event.

A few things that actually help:

• Smile before you’re spoken to, not just in response to something. It sets the tone rather than reacting to it.
• Keep your body open. Uncross your arms, relax your shoulders, and make good eye contact.
• Take a breath before you answer a question rather than rushing straight in. It reads as composed, not slow.
• Don’t try to be the joker or the loudest person in the room. This is about being warm and approachable, not putting on a performance or bringing main character energy.
• Look for opportunities to engage with other candidates, not just the recruiter. If small talk doesn’t come naturally, our guide to safe conversation topics for your cabin crew Assessment Day has some good starting points.

Nerves are completely normal, and no recruiter expects you to be free of them. The goal isn’t to eliminate nerves. It’s to stop them from being the only thing the recruiter picks up on.

Worth Knowing

This works both ways, and it isn’t only the recruiter you need to think about. On an Assessment Day especially, you could be sitting in a room full of other nervous candidates for an hour or more before anything even starts.

That collective anxiety is its own kind of emotional contagion, and it’s easy to absorb it without noticing: one person’s fidgeting spreads, someone’s nervous joke about failing sets a tone, and before long the whole waiting room feels flat and tense.

The same applies if you sense a recruiter is having an off day, low energy, distracted, running behind schedule. It’s natural to read that as being about you, and to let your own attitude dip in response. Neither of these is something you can control.

What you can control is noticing it happening and choosing not to let it dictate your own state. That’s the actual skill here: recognising when someone else’s mood, whether it’s a fellow candidate or the recruiter, is starting to pull your attitude down, and consciously resetting rather than drifting along with it. Staying warm and steady yourself is often what breaks that cycle rather than continuing it.

Quick Checklist

• Remember the recruiter wants you to succeed. Their job is easier when they find a good candidate.
• Emotions spread in both directions. Your attitude affects theirs, and their attitude affects yours.
• The first couple of minutes set the tone for the whole interaction. Lead with warmth rather than waiting to see how it goes.
• Make eye contact. It’s one of the simplest ways to signal warmth and confidence, and its absence is one of the fastest ways to be read as nervous or disengaged.
• A calm, steady presence can shift the mood of the whole room, including the recruiter’s.