May 2003
Volume 16, Number 5
Max Bazerman is the Jesse Isidor Straus professor of business administration at Harvard University. He was previously on the faculty of the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University for 15 years. Bazerman's research focuses on decision making, negotiation, creating joint gains in society, and the natural environment.
As a faculty member in a business school1 since 1979, I have often heard concerns and observations such expressed by psychology PhDs recruited by my department, including:
- Economists dominate business schools.
- There's no subject pool in business schools.
- You have to teach MBA students.
- The pay is much better in business schools.
- Business schools don't appreciate basic research sufficiently.
- Professors in business schools don't get their own lab space.
While each one of these statements is at least roughly accurate, they fail to capture, both individually and in total, the key distinctions between being a psychologist in a psychology department and being a psychologist in a business school.
Before clarifying what I believe to be the key differences, it is important to note the similarities. Business schools and psychology departments both value the creation of new knowledge. Both value publication in what they view to be top journals. Both prefer dedicated teachers over indifferent educators. You can find excellent doctoral students as a member of a psychology department or as members of a business school. You can also have great psychologists as colleagues. In my most recent two positions (Northwestern, 1985-2000; Harvard, 1998 to present), I have had the opportunity to collaborate with, and learn from, excellent members of psychology departments, including Doug Medin, Dedre Gentner, Reid Hastie, Tom Tyler, Dan Gilbert, Dan Wegner, Nick Epley, Richard Hackman, and Mahzarin Banaji. At the same time, I have interacted with many excellent psychologists employed in business schools, including David Messick, Leigh Thompson, Keith Murnighan, Jeanne Brett, Deb Gruenfeld, Teresa Amabile, and Lorraine Idson. Both sets of colleagues have been essential to my intellectual development. A faculty member working in either a psychology department or a business school can expect to have access to collegial interaction across schools.
Yet differences do exist. Business schools tend to provide more generous research funding and to have better networked computer systems for research. Psychology departments tend to be better programmed to run pure laboratory experiments. However, flexible researchers can overcome the limitations of either group.
So, what are the key differences? First, in a psychology department, you are likely to be located near psychologists from beyond your immediate group of close colleagues. As a social psychologist, you are likely to know more about the latest developments in cognitive, developmental, and clinical psychology than your counterparts in the business school. By contrast, in a business school, you will interact with economists, psychologists, sociologists, interdisciplinary researchers, and still more economists (yes, there are a lot of them in business schools). A great deal can be learned from either group of colleagues. I think that psychologists benefit especially from interactions with basic researchers, but I also believe that top-notch social science emerges across disciplines. In addition, life experiences prompt observations that can fuel social science. Business schools may have the edge on prompting real-world thinking.
A second difference is that in a psychology department, faculty have very crisp preferences about journals. In a business school, more openness exists to the nature of the outlet. Publishing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology or Psychological Bulletin is valued very highly, but so is publishing in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and the Academy of Management Review. Business schools offer more flexibility, but also create more ambiguity of expectation.
Third, and most importantly, as compared to those in psychology departments, psychologists in business schools tend to do research that more closely approaches prescription. This does not mean that they are practitioners. Rather, it means that their research is often one step closer to offering advice than is research conducted by members of psychology departments. A key example of this distinction comes from the field of behavioral decision research, pioneered by Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman. Behavioral decision research delineates the systematic ways in which people psychologically deviate from rational behavior. Members of psychology departments have been undecided concerning where this field fits into their departments. Cognitive psychologists have criticized the identification of departures from rationality as lacking a model of underlying cognition, and social psychologists have appropriately noted that much of this work is not about social behavior. In contrast, because departures from rationality clarify mistakes for humans to avoid, behavioral decision research has been a natural fit in business schools. The fact that these departures are often measured against economic models provides further dialogue between psychologists and their colleagues in other business school departments. As a result, behavioral decision researchers have flocked to management schools, while their intellectual cousins in social-cognitive psychology remain more comfortable in psychology departments.
Where do you belong? This may be a tough question. As decision researchers would advise, many new psychology PhDs apply to both psychology departments and business schools, and then wait for more data. Hopefully this column adds a bit of guidance regarding the key distinctions that psychologists might find in a management school, in comparison to the comfortable surroundings of a psychology department.
