Why is psychology relevant for the workplace?

As an MSc student in Stirling, you have the opportunity to take Professor Alex Wood's "Psychology of Work" class in the first term. It explores the importance and role of psychology in the workplace and how practitioners apply psychological theories to issues in the workplace, with the aim of increasing organisational effectiveness and ensuring the satisfaction of people at work.  

One of the assignments I submitted this year tackles the broad sweeping question of "Why is psychology relevant for the workplace?" and it provides a detailed summary of five key areas within the British Psychological Society Curriculum for Occupational Psychology: employee engagement and relations; selection and assessment; training; learning and development; and the design of the work environment. I conclude with a discussion of the role personality plays within the work contexts.

The purpose of this post it twofold: to give MSc applicants an insight into this fascinating topic; and to give seasoned readers a resource that they can use in their research or in the design of course syllabus. 

Click here to download the paper in .pdf. 

To summarise:

1. Employee relations and engagement, defined as “managing fairly and getting the best out of people” (Gamble, 2006), has been seen through the lens of a master servant relationship, the mechanistic worker relationship and now the individual employee relationship.  
2. Selection and assessment focuses mainly on the need to have people in positions who either have the characteristics required for effective job performance or the capacities for learning and development.
3. In order to have organisational success, interactive and relative training programmes need to be developed, as do effective and validated career development and appraisal programmes for employees. 
4. Careful consideration also needs to be placed into the design of the work environment to ensure that it matches the capabilities of human performance and minimises the risks of work to health and well-being. 
5. Though any individual behaviour is not very predictable from personality, general behaviour is. It is determined by both the situation and the stable individual differences, and individuals’ can also be identified by the extent to which their personalities vary across situations.

Questionable research practises in psychological research: some evidence

The ever interesting British Psychological Society Research Digest discusses here an article forthcoming in Psychological Science which documents questionable research practises in psychology based on an anonymous survey of 2000 academics. It comes on foot of the revelation of serious and persistent fraud by a social psychologist in the Netherlands.

Research in economics differs from psychology in number of ways. In particular, we are much less likely to collect our own data and less likely to do experiments. Nonetheless there are plenty of oportunities for dubious if not outright fraudulent practises. It would be good if someone tried to quantify this.

I suspect that the selective reporting of results, cherry-picking, is the most common form of malpractice. As far as I know, when people try to replicate others’ econometric results the track record is not good.

Derren Brown: The Experiments

Tomorrow sees the conclusion of a recent series of Channel 4 programmes put together by the illusionist Derren Brown: The Eperiments. According to the Wikipedia entry, it is a series of "ambitious sociological experiments, in which the unwitting subject is a single person, a crowd, or even an entire town."

The first episode, entitled "The Assassin"... consists of Brown successfully hypnotising an unwitting member of the public to 'assassinate' a celebrity revealed to be Stephen Fry. This technique was used as a comparison to conspiracy theories regarding the assassination of Robert Kennedy by Sirhan Sirhan, who claims to have no memory of the event... In the second episode, "Remote Control"... Brown hosted a game show, asking a masked audience to vote for the escalating outcome of the fate of one contestant in an attempt to demonstrate the effect of deindividuation. The theory is that taking away individuality from someone turns them from themselves to just part of a crowd, and makes them act in a way that would sometimes go against their morals... In the third episode, "The Guilt Trip"... Brown attempted to find out if he could convince someone through association to admit to a crime they didn't commit. He worked through tricking a participant into distrusting their own memory and having excessive feelings of guilt, to the extent where he confessed to the murder of an actor whom he had interacted with and was later told had been murdered... In the fourth episode, "The Secret of Luck"... (due to air tomorrow)... Brown spreads a rumour of a lucky dog statue throughout an entire town and documents the consequences.

These experiments should be of interest to behavioural economists in the context of the Nudge theory (and the impact of Nudge on public policy; especially Thaler and Sunstein's discussion of libertarian paternalism). In particular, Brown's "Gameshow" experiment is evocative of the Stanford Prisoner Experiment. Brown's experiments can be investiagted further on YouTube or 4OD. Below is a trailer for the "Gameshow" episode.

Unanticipated Interpersonal and Societal Consequences of Choice

Thanks to Clare for pointing me to this paper forthcoming in Psychological Science by Savani, Stevens and Markus. Abstract below.

Abstract
Choice makes North Americans feel more in control, free, and independent, and thus has many positive consequences for individuals’ motivation and well-being. We report five studies that uncover novel consequences of choice for public policy and
interpersonal judgments. Studies 1-3 found that activating the concept of choice decreases support for policies promoting intergroup equality (e.g., affirmative action) and societal benefits (e.g., reducing environmental pollution), but increases support for policies promoting individual rights (e.g., legalizing drugs). Studies 4 and 5 found that activating the concept of choice increases victim-blaming and decreases empathy for disadvantaged others. Study 5 found that choice does not decrease Indians’ empathy for disadvantaged individuals, indicating that these effects of choice are culture specific. This research suggest that the well-known positive consequences of choice for individuals can be accompanied by an array of previously unexamined and potentially negative consequences for others and for society.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ESP Paper

This one has been discussed for a few months online but, to be honest, psi phenomena were not high on my reading list toward the end of last year. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is an extremely good psychology journal by most sensible metrics, and so its decision to publish a paper on ESP has set the cat among the pigeons. The NYT gives an account of this here. A large amount of the internet comment on this centres around the limitations of classical hypothesis testing as well as publication bias in psychology journals. Bem discusses these issues in the conclusion, acknowledging some elements of the "file-drawer" problem though not problems, in his opinion, sufficient to generate the results. He also discusses some problems that might arise in replication. The paper reports statistically significant evidence in 8 out of 9 experiments looking at four types of "psi" phenomena - precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. The NYT article above gives some flavour of the reactions to this paper.

Economic crisis and our elites

Ken McKenzie, formerly of the Geary Institute, offers an interesting psychological perspective on how the crisis might change how our elites do their business.

The Weirdest People in the World?

Aside from its catchy title, this paper seems pretty relevant for those do experimental psychology and behavioural economics:

The Weirdest People in the World?
Joseph Henrich, Steve J. Heine, Ara Norenzayan
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species—frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, selfconcepts and related motivation and the heritability of IQ.

Psychology Students and Economics

I will be giving talks again this term to psychology students on behavioural economics. I have given a number of talks before about the potential role of psychology graduates in the modern economy. Some of this material is relatively obvious to people who have studied behavioural economics. My basic point in motivating psychology students to think about behavioural economics is that they have a strong role in dealing with many of the major challenges the world is facing in the 21st century. If we look at areas such as pensions reform, much of this comes down squarely to human psychology including issues such as future thinking, trust, procrastination, social network effects and so on. Increasingly, in areas such as climate change there is a greater emphasis in understanding the psychology of how people respond to incentives as well as understanding the best incentives to design from a theoretical point of view. In Ireland, the design of unemployment schemes, financial regulation reform, taxation and a wide range of other areas are now only informed by people with psychology training to a very surface degree and are areas where real psychology input could potentially yield very high social and economic returns.

Almost all the basic psychology undergraduate syllabus is relevant to economics but particularly relevant are courses in cognitive psychology, social psychology and neuroscience. If you look at the references in many modern economics journals, you will increasingly see citations to classic works in these fields. Some of the leading drivers throughout the 20th century of cognitive psychology such as Daniel Kahneman and Herbert Simon were also Economics Nobel winners. Thought leaders in economics such as Sendhil Mullainthan and Andre Shleifer are increasingly drawing from cognitive theories of attention to explain a wide range of economic phenomena from poverty to stock market fluctuations. Social psychology is also becoming increasingly influential in economics, with a great deal of work emerging on herding, conformity and related group processes. There is a also a growing field of neuroeconomics, which examines the neural basis of economic decisions.

While most psychology undergraduates have options in areas relevant to public policy such as health psychology, and relevant to business such as consumer psychology, it is still the case that most psychology students view major economic and social institutions such as healthcare, legal and financial systems as somehow outside their remit, with economics graduates largely dominating many of our core institutions globally. My experience with psychology students so far is that they are bright, interested in people and very comfortable with "hands-on" data gathering, field experiments and so on. I think there should be more people with psychology training in the heart of economic policy design in the context particularly of multidisciplinary teams. More on this issue as the term progresses.

Case studies

Case studies play no role in economics although there is some similarity with the "natural experiments" that are popular with some econometricians. In psychology, however, case studies have been very influential for example lesion studies where an individual's capacities have been compromised by some insult. Phineas Gage is the most famous perhaps. BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting a series on classic case studies that are well known in psychology. They include the case of a man who's vision was restored after 50 years, leading to an unhappy outcome, and Dora the famous patient of Freud, an association that also did not work out particularly well.

Truth, Torture and Memory

Torture techniques used on suspected terrorists by the Bush administration may have failed to get to the truth, researchers say.

Professor Shane O'Mara of Trinity College, Dublin, said the interrogation techniques had a detrimental effect on brain functions related to memory. His review is published in the journal, Trends in Cognitive Science.

BBC News story available here. Extract as follows: "Professor O'Mara said contemporary neuroscientific models of human memory showed that the hippocampus and prefrontal cortices of the brain were very important. The stress hormone, cortisol, binds to receptors in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex increasing neuronal excitability which compromises the normal functioning of the brain if it is sustained."

Days of our Lives

No, not the popular American sitcom that has been running on NBC since 1965. It's an article by Singer and Willett in the Psychological Bulletin on event history analysis for psychologists: "Modelling the Days of Our Lives: Using Survival Analysis When Designing and Analysing Longitudinal Studies of Duration and the Timing of Events".

What is Socionomics?

According to Wikipedia, in 1979, Robert Prechter postulated that social mood drives financial, macroeconomic and political behavior, in contrast to the conventional notion that such events drive social mood. His description of social mood as the driver of cultural trends reached a national audience in a 1985 cover article in Barron's. Prechter coined the term "socionomics" and in 1999 published an exposition of socionomic theory, The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior.

Since then, the counter-intuitive premise of the socionomic hypothesis -- that in contexts of uncertainty, endogenous processes (not exogenous causes) create patterns of social behavior -- has gained attention in academic journals (see below), and in research funded by the National Science Foundation.

The Socionomics Institute links to studies, papers and articles that illustrate and explore the socionomic perspective.

Prechter, Robert R., Jr. (2001). "Unconscious Herding Behavior as the Psychological Basis of Financial Market Trends and Patterns," Journal of Psychology and Financial Markets (now Journal of Behavioral Finance), vol. 2 no. 3, pp. 120-125.

Olson, Kenneth R. (2006). "A Literature Review of Social Mood," Journal of Behavioral Finance, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 193-203.

Prechter, Robert R., Jr., and Wayne D. Parker (2007). "The Financial/Economic Dichotomy in Social Behavioral Dynamics: The Socionomic Perspective," Journal of Behavioral Finance, vol. 8 no. 2], pp. 84-108.

The Psychology of Surveys

Barry C. Burden of Harvard University lectures on the science and technology behind measuring public opinion. How can we know what 200 million Americans think, feel, and know? Can telephone interviews with a few hundred people really describe public opinion? How much can answers be manipulated by rewording the questions?

TCD Psychology Blog

Michael Daly has revamped the TCD Psychology blog - looks good. He seems to have solved some problems with blogger design that i have not had time to figure out so expect a change of design on this blog as soon as I track Michael down.

http://tcdpsychology.blogspot.com/

Psychology podcasts

Some interesting & quirky podcasts of interviews about psychology from shrinkrapradio.com