Researchers have tested this many times, in different places, over many years, and they keep finding the same result. This one is safe to trust.
The psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes the mind as a rider on an elephant. The elephant is intuition: large, fast, and it decides where to walk. The rider is conscious reasoning, and the rider's job is mostly not steering. It is composing respectable explanations for wherever the elephant already chose to go. He demonstrated this with experiments in moral judgment. People deliver a verdict almost instantly, and when researchers take apart their stated reasons one at a time, the verdict does not move. Subjects go quiet, admit they cannot explain themselves, and then insist they still know they are right. He called that state moral dumbfounding. Verdict first, reasons afterwards, arranged to look like the cause. The broader point has separate support from older work showing people confidently explain behaviour using reasons that demonstrably were not the cause.
Carry that picture into any evaluation you take part in. Within the opening minutes of an interview, something has usually already decided, moved by a handshake, an accent, a resemblance to somebody half remembered. Everything after that is the press conference, where professional sounding language gets assembled for a conclusion that was reached earlier. Lacked strategic depth. Concerns about seniority. The words are real, and they are not the reason. The only defence is to write down what you would need to see before you meet the person, and to score against that rather than against the account you will construct afterwards.
Source: Haidt, 2001, Psychological Review, and the moral dumbfounding studies. Related: Nisbett and Wilson, 1977, on explanations given for behaviour.
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt, 2012
Where the rider and the elephant are set out in full, along with what it means for disagreement between people.
Draw your own card. It does not take long, and it rewards taking your time.