Psychological Science at Work
The indispensable research blog on the science of the modern workplace, covering everything from leadership and management to the behavioral, social, and cognitive dynamics behind performance and achievement. 
Science Reveals the Benefits of an Aging Workforce
The over-65 set is not only increasing in numbers (by 2030 the percentage of people age 65 and older is expected to increase from almost 13 percent to almost 20 percent, according to data from the Stanford Center on Longevity). They are also healthier and more active than in previous generations. That means many of them will be working longer than a generation ago. Does their increasing presence in the workplace predict an increase or decrease in ageism?
Psychological researchers are stepping up research on bias against older adults as part of an effort to break stereotypes on aging and curb age discrimination.
In the workforce, older employees are viewed as having many more negative traits than positive ones, as a meta-analysis in 2011 in Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences demonstrates. The analysis included field and laboratory…
Tags: Aging, Bias, Employment Discrimination, Performance | No Comments »
The Job Candidate’s GPA: There’s More Than Meets the ‘A’
At face value, a job applicant’s grade point average seems a reasonable predictor of effective job performance – a high GPA signals the individual has a considerable degree of competence. No wonder two-thirds of all employers use it as a screening tool, and more than half eliminate applicants with a 3.0 or lower.
Indeed, GPA is a powerful indicator. But according to new research, many employers and admissions professionals use it imperfectly – without comparing an individual’s GPA to their school’s average – a practice that leads to systematic mistakes in selection decisions.
“Our results indicate that candidates who have demonstrated high performance thanks to favorable situations are more likely to be rated highly and selected,” explains lead author Samuel Swift of University of California, Berkeley and his team of researchers.
This pervasive tendency leads to errors in assessing true performance: Is…
Tags: college, Education, Employment Network, GPA, job candidates, recruitment | No Comments »
The Dark Side of Empathy
Conventional wisdom, backed up by substantial experimental research, holds that we’re more cooperative in negotiations when we can truly see the other person’s point of view. But in some cases, seeing a situation from the other’s perspective can lead us into unethical behavior.
A team of behavioral researchers suspected that in competitive contexts, perspective-taking draws our attention to conflicting interests and to how a competitor’s actions may threaten our own self-interest. They confirmed their hypothesis in a series of experiments, the results of which are reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
In one of the experiments, for examples, the researchers — led by Jason Pierce, Universidad Adolfo Ibanez in Chile — recruited 70 MBA students and assigned them to one of two conditions. Individuals in one group were asked to…
Tags: Cognitive Processes, Competition, Emotions, Ethics, Morality, Perception, Social Behavior, Social Interaction | No Comments »
Fast Forward Yourself
Government leaders have raised the alarm bells about the paltry retirement savings of the large cadre of Baby Boomers entering their golden years. But how do you get employees to put more money away?
People are not wired to contemplate the future, and tend to plan for it in an impersonal way. Yet some people are still able to sock away a healthy degree of resources for the future. And emerging research shows that those people have what is essentially a relationship with their future selves.
A study published earlier this year in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, showed that powerful people feel a stronger connection with their future selves.
In the first in a series of experiments, Priyanka Joshi and Nathanael Fast of the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business…
Tags: Aging, Cognitive Processes, Cognitive Psychology, Decision Making, Motivation | No Comments »
Dissecting the Perceptions of White Male Privilege
Despite all the advances that women and people of color have made in professional settings over the last several decades, White men still tend to have the upper hand on getting the corner offices, the lofty job titles, or the hefty salary hikes.
But how do women perceive the marginalization that people of color face in the workplace? And how do minorities perceive the obstacles faced by women?
A report published in Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, provides some answers to these questions. Ashleigh Rosette, a professor in Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and psychological scientist Leigh Plunkett Tost of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, conducted a series of studies to examine how having high status in one social setting and low status in another effects one’s social perceptions.
Rosette and…
Tags: Bias, Cognitive Psychology, Employment Discrimination, Gender, Perception, Psychological Science, Race Relations, Social Interaction | No Comments »