This is/., so no one RTFA, but itâ(TM)s the Finnish parliament that stopped it for political reasons in December, only one year into the two year experiment, not because it failed. We wonâ(TM)t know what happened in the study until 2019.
It's any social media use at all while at work. One of the dimensions of "good" behaviors was participating in an online work community. Presumably, most people would not think that using Facebook would help their job performance, so they would not report that as "good".
Some "good" example survey items linked in the article:
I request help from people on social media when I am having trouble solving a problem at work.
I communicate with existing customers or clients via social media.
When someone posts something negative about our organization or its employees on social media, I try to do something about it.
The people participating in the study thought these behaviors would help their job performance.... communicating with customers, reaching out to new customers, participating in an online work community, communicating with coworkers, gathering information from colleagues, asking friends/coworkers/family for help solving a work problem, and using social media as a technical solution (e.g. transferring a file from one computer to another). On the surface, it looks like these things would help in many jobs. But from the data, they were unassociated with better work performance.
Well, the study is just about "leading to aggression" and not "leading to homicide."
The NES often made me, at least, want to throw my controller through the wall. That experience is probably a lot less common these days (in this age of easier, accessible gaming).
Who the hell is their focus group? I've not met a single person who doesn't use the start button.
I believe they collect anonymous click data. But guess who disables/declines collection of anonymous click data? People who actually know how to use their computers.
At some point, sure. Programmers will all be out of work once computers can effectively program themselves. But right now, it's not so straightforward. The OP describes call centers, and that's a really good example - while a simulator can present call center tasks to a job candidate (with simulated customer voices, for example), a simulator responding to customer service calls would not be nearly so successful.
A video game simulation is a controlled environment (HR can create a set of scenarios to be tested in the simulation) but real life is more random. It's up to HR to create a reasonable sample of work scenarios for the simulation, and the quality of those scenarios is directly proportional to the quality of the information you get out of the simulation. And it's also important to realize that they not claiming that simulations are the only hiring tool you'll ever need. They're just better than interviews alone (and way better than unstructured interviews, which are almost worthless).
I will say that I don't know a single organization that uses a simulation and NOTHING else. It would be very difficult to assess characteristics like interpersonal skills and job experience. A simulation is usually just one step of a larger hurdle-based system (usually a late step, since they tend to be expensive per-applicant).
For either medicine or sanitation to have made a substantial effect on life expectancy, we'd expect the timeline of advances in each to mirror advances in life expectancy (e.g. major medical breakthrough in 1973 matching a substantial increase in life expectancy in 1980). That clearly doesn't happen. Sanitation and medicine are both only a small piece of a much larger puzzle.
You clearly don't have or know anyone with an actual mental disorder. There is certainly harm done by false diagnosis/labeling, and some people certainly milk their diagnoses, but the majority of people with mental disorders find it somewhat of a relief when they discover that they have a condition that 1) is not their fault and 2) has treatment options.
Think of it this way - if you grew up, and throughout your elementary and even high school experience, you had skills and abilities that other people thought were bizarre, people always looked at you weird and you didn't know why, you had uncontrollable tics that other people just didn't, you were frustrated daily because you had a very difficult time controlling your own behaviors, and you constantly got in trouble because these behaviors were judged to be "bad."
Finding out "other people have this problem too, and here's what you can try to alleviate the symptoms" is important to help these people become "normal, productive members of society." Your assertion that diagnosis will "lead the majority of them to make excuses" is completely unfounded.
Also keep in mind that many students want to be someplace else too.
It all really depends on your priorities as a student, which is never really made clear to applying undergraduates. If you are self-motivated and want to have the opportunity to get involved in a real laboratory and get experience as a research assistant, then go to an R1 university. You won't have as motivated instructors, but you'll have access to better facilities than you will elsewhere.
But if you can't motivate yourself to learn from a book, and you need an instructor to tailor the material so that it's easier for you to learn it, you're probably better off at a small liberal arts college.
Others have noted that the database could negatively affect some researchers for whom a book's subject matter isn't always why they read it."
This is a little vague. The purpose of one of TFAs is to show how inaccurate the metadata on books in their database can be, and how Google is unwilling to do anything about it. Thus, when researchers use Google book search to look up information about books, rather than read the book (as the summary implies), they can be mislead.
Two examples from TFA: a search for "Internet" in books published before 1950 produces 527 results, and a book entitled "Culture and Society 1780-1950" was supposedly published in 1899.
They also defined effect size (a measure of the magnitude of a difference) as a measure of statistical significance (a decision based on the probability that an observed effect size would have occurred due to chance). But I suppose math/statistic confusion is even more common than experimental design confusion.
This is where RTFA comes in handy. The first paragraph of TFA:
You won't find Amegy Bank of Texas CEO Paul B. Murphy Jr. uploading new profile pictures onto Facebook or linking Twitter feeds to a MySpace page. Murphy, who heads the 87-branch, Houston-based bank, isn't personally involved in the brave new world of social networking Web sites, but he certainly knows what they are. And thanks to his lawyer, his bank is successfully navigating the legal land mines they can contain.
But then what does this include? Isn't knowledge a psychological state? Affectivity? Willingness to communicate? "You can't discriminate against me just because I don't know things." "You can't discriminate against me just because I hate everyone around me." "You can't discriminate against me just because I refuse to talk to my coworkers."
It's a slippery slope, which is why it hasn't been added already...
True - the correlation between intelligence tests and job performance are usually around.5-.6 and the correlation between conscientiousness (a personality trait) and JP is usually around.2-.3 - but it's better than nothing. But that's why I don't suggest small businesses use them. They only help organizational outcomes (profit) when used in the aggregate, over hundreds of applicants.
For reference, the correlation between unstructured interviews conducting by HR managers and JP is around 0...
But you are still relying on the hiring manager having some degree of skill at identifying these people. And why is a test any more humiliating than an interview?
The one extraordinary employee you throw away could easily outweigh the benefits of increasing job performance on average.
Drug tests are actually related to job performance as well. If you correlate drug test pass/fail rates with supervisor ratings of job performance within companies that use drug tests but don't hire on them, there actually is a correlation - people who pass drug tests perform better. It's also easily legally defensible, which makes it a no-brainer for most hiring organizations.
Personality actually is correlated with job performance as well, and is job-related. The most empircally-supported personality trait is conscientiousness, which is a person's general tendency toward organization, orderliness, and meeting deadlines. Guess where that kind of tendency is useful. If you already like being organized, and your company wants you to be organized, you're probably going to be better at it than someone who doesn't like it.
Also, if you are conducting a major hiring effort to add 100 employees, your assertion probably is not true. 100 slightly above average employees will still better produce better overall organizational outcomes than 99 randomly hired employees and 1 exceptional one.
There are modern studies that show the same thing - intelligence test score means still differ by race, and intelligence tests are the best predictor of job performance that we know of, substantially better than knowledge tests or interviews. It creates a bit of a legal problem, considering Title VII. The best predictor of job performance that we know of usually shows mean racial differences.
Personality test score means don't differ by race however (NEO included), which is part of what makes them so attractive to HR.
Well, many people suggest taking anyone that appears to be cheating and either 1) not hire them, or 2) put them through a more rigorous interview process. If you can hire the non-cheaters for $10 per applicant, and then do a more rigorous interview (at whatever hourly rate the hiring manager earns) for those that might be cheating, the company is ultimately saving money on their hiring system, which is the purpose of using these tests in the first place.
And on that note, I would never suggest using personality tests in small businesses - the correlation between personality test scores and job performance is just too low for it to be justifiable unless you are introducing it into an environment in which hundreds of potential employees will be taking it (in which case, it should still be part of a multi-stage system).
That sounds like a company correctly testing a personality measure that they are considering adapting in the future, even if the test itself wasn't very good. This is one of the ways to ensure a test will be legally defensible - have every new employee take it, but don't hire them based on it. Then see if the personality test scores correlate with their job performance (usually as measured by supervisors) at some time later.
There is no spiritual ancestry in modern personality testing with the MBTI - it lacks the psychometric properties required of tests these days (reliability and validity). It is still used because the creators still want to make money off of it. Few industrial psychologists with any decent statistical training would be caught dead using it.
An example of a modern personality test that is currently used (and has been successfully legally defended) is the NEO-PI-R. Scores on several scales in this measure have been demonstrated to correlate with job performance across a variety of jobs.
This is actually hotly debated amongst industrial psychologists.
Vendors of personality tests include items that "detect" patterns of responses that appear to be due to this kind of cheating. They then look at these cheaters (the ones who are purposefully answer how a "good employee" would answer instead of with their own tendencies) and check their level of job performance. Oddly enough, there is a correlation - people who pad their responses to look like a "good employee" also tend to have higher job performance ratings, at least as it appears to their supervisors.
There are actually several validation techniques that you can use to do just that. Personality actually has a moderate but fairly consistent relationship with job performance across most job types.
The problem is that the shinyness surrounding personality in the business world these days makes a lot of organizations think that they can just write some questions about the kind of people they like, throw that into an online test, and hope for the best. This does not work, and is not usually legally defensible.
Also - discrimination is legal. Hiring someone with more work experience is discriminatory in nature. Discriminating against a protected class is not. But generally speaking, as long as the results of the personality test do not correlate with membership in a protected group (race, color, religion, sex, or national origin - see Title VII), or predict job performance differently between members of the various classes, then that is not a concern.
Grades are important, but only while you are competing against other recent college graduates. If a company is hiring a new IT person and has 10 recent graduates to look between, the one with the highest grades will be an easy call for an interview.
But that isn't the situation now.
Right now, we have laid off IT workers who have already had a job, sometimes years of them, and that experience (and demonstrated success at holding a job for a while) is more valuable than your schooling, and a 0.5 difference in GPA.
Someone liked them long enough to let them keep an IT job for some number of years. You, however, are an unknown factor. Thus, they are the safer bet.
They have already proven they can stick to a college degree long enough to get it (as have you). They have also proven they can be successful in a real IT environment. Thus, they are 2 for 2. You are 1 for 2.
Just get any IT job you can find, at least for now. Trade up when options are better. Don't hold out for your dream job now, or you might not get anything at all.
As a person who RTFA, you would know that they only experimented on monkeys who already showed equal preference between the colors before giving them the choice.
They collected data until they were confident that the monkey equally preferred all of the colors. THEN they forced the monkey to make a choice between the three. THEN, they recorded the monkey's color preference on subsequent choices. That is where they found that the monkey's color preferences had changed as a result of the forced choice (which is the rationalization for calling the whole thing "cognitive dissonance.")
That would imply that they can tell the difference, or else their preferences would not have changed after forcing a choice.
Slashdot Mirror
This is /., so no one RTFA, but itâ(TM)s the Finnish parliament that stopped it for political reasons in December, only one year into the two year experiment, not because it failed. We wonâ(TM)t know what happened in the study until 2019.
It's any social media use at all while at work. One of the dimensions of "good" behaviors was participating in an online work community. Presumably, most people would not think that using Facebook would help their job performance, so they would not report that as "good".
Some "good" example survey items linked in the article:
I request help from people on social media when I am having trouble solving a problem at work.
I communicate with existing customers or clients via social media.
When someone posts something negative about our organization or its employees on social media, I try to do something about it.
The people participating in the study thought these behaviors would help their job performance.... communicating with customers, reaching out to new customers, participating in an online work community, communicating with coworkers, gathering information from colleagues, asking friends/coworkers/family for help solving a work problem, and using social media as a technical solution (e.g. transferring a file from one computer to another). On the surface, it looks like these things would help in many jobs. But from the data, they were unassociated with better work performance.
Well, the study is just about "leading to aggression" and not "leading to homicide." The NES often made me, at least, want to throw my controller through the wall. That experience is probably a lot less common these days (in this age of easier, accessible gaming).
Who the hell is their focus group? I've not met a single person who doesn't use the start button.
I believe they collect anonymous click data. But guess who disables/declines collection of anonymous click data? People who actually know how to use their computers.
At some point, sure. Programmers will all be out of work once computers can effectively program themselves. But right now, it's not so straightforward. The OP describes call centers, and that's a really good example - while a simulator can present call center tasks to a job candidate (with simulated customer voices, for example), a simulator responding to customer service calls would not be nearly so successful.
A video game simulation is a controlled environment (HR can create a set of scenarios to be tested in the simulation) but real life is more random. It's up to HR to create a reasonable sample of work scenarios for the simulation, and the quality of those scenarios is directly proportional to the quality of the information you get out of the simulation. And it's also important to realize that they not claiming that simulations are the only hiring tool you'll ever need. They're just better than interviews alone (and way better than unstructured interviews, which are almost worthless).
I will say that I don't know a single organization that uses a simulation and NOTHING else. It would be very difficult to assess characteristics like interpersonal skills and job experience. A simulation is usually just one step of a larger hurdle-based system (usually a late step, since they tend to be expensive per-applicant).
Life expectancy has been going up at a pretty consistent rate in the United States since 1968.
For either medicine or sanitation to have made a substantial effect on life expectancy, we'd expect the timeline of advances in each to mirror advances in life expectancy (e.g. major medical breakthrough in 1973 matching a substantial increase in life expectancy in 1980). That clearly doesn't happen. Sanitation and medicine are both only a small piece of a much larger puzzle.
You clearly don't have or know anyone with an actual mental disorder. There is certainly harm done by false diagnosis/labeling, and some people certainly milk their diagnoses, but the majority of people with mental disorders find it somewhat of a relief when they discover that they have a condition that 1) is not their fault and 2) has treatment options.
Think of it this way - if you grew up, and throughout your elementary and even high school experience, you had skills and abilities that other people thought were bizarre, people always looked at you weird and you didn't know why, you had uncontrollable tics that other people just didn't, you were frustrated daily because you had a very difficult time controlling your own behaviors, and you constantly got in trouble because these behaviors were judged to be "bad."
Finding out "other people have this problem too, and here's what you can try to alleviate the symptoms" is important to help these people become "normal, productive members of society." Your assertion that diagnosis will "lead the majority of them to make excuses" is completely unfounded.
Also keep in mind that many students want to be someplace else too. It all really depends on your priorities as a student, which is never really made clear to applying undergraduates. If you are self-motivated and want to have the opportunity to get involved in a real laboratory and get experience as a research assistant, then go to an R1 university. You won't have as motivated instructors, but you'll have access to better facilities than you will elsewhere. But if you can't motivate yourself to learn from a book, and you need an instructor to tailor the material so that it's easier for you to learn it, you're probably better off at a small liberal arts college.
Others have noted that the database could negatively affect some researchers for whom a book's subject matter isn't always why they read it."
This is a little vague. The purpose of one of TFAs is to show how inaccurate the metadata on books in their database can be, and how Google is unwilling to do anything about it. Thus, when researchers use Google book search to look up information about books, rather than read the book (as the summary implies), they can be mislead.
Two examples from TFA: a search for "Internet" in books published before 1950 produces 527 results, and a book entitled "Culture and Society 1780-1950" was supposedly published in 1899.
They also defined effect size (a measure of the magnitude of a difference) as a measure of statistical significance (a decision based on the probability that an observed effect size would have occurred due to chance). But I suppose math/statistic confusion is even more common than experimental design confusion.
This is where RTFA comes in handy. The first paragraph of TFA:
You won't find Amegy Bank of Texas CEO Paul B. Murphy Jr. uploading new profile pictures onto Facebook or linking Twitter feeds to a MySpace page. Murphy, who heads the 87-branch, Houston-based bank, isn't personally involved in the brave new world of social networking Web sites, but he certainly knows what they are. And thanks to his lawyer, his bank is successfully navigating the legal land mines they can contain.
But then what does this include? Isn't knowledge a psychological state? Affectivity? Willingness to communicate?
"You can't discriminate against me just because I don't know things."
"You can't discriminate against me just because I hate everyone around me."
"You can't discriminate against me just because I refuse to talk to my coworkers."
It's a slippery slope, which is why it hasn't been added already...
True - the correlation between intelligence tests and job performance are usually around .5-.6 and the correlation between conscientiousness (a personality trait) and JP is usually around .2-.3 - but it's better than nothing. But that's why I don't suggest small businesses use them. They only help organizational outcomes (profit) when used in the aggregate, over hundreds of applicants.
For reference, the correlation between unstructured interviews conducting by HR managers and JP is around 0...
Bah... nevermind. My math is terrible. :)
But you are still relying on the hiring manager having some degree of skill at identifying these people. And why is a test any more humiliating than an interview?
100 people + $10 per online test = $1000 expense
100 people x 15 minutes organizational time spent per interview x $20/h hiring manager = $30000 expense
Which would you go with?
The one extraordinary employee you throw away could easily outweigh the benefits of increasing job performance on average.
Drug tests are actually related to job performance as well. If you correlate drug test pass/fail rates with supervisor ratings of job performance within companies that use drug tests but don't hire on them, there actually is a correlation - people who pass drug tests perform better. It's also easily legally defensible, which makes it a no-brainer for most hiring organizations.
Personality actually is correlated with job performance as well, and is job-related. The most empircally-supported personality trait is conscientiousness, which is a person's general tendency toward organization, orderliness, and meeting deadlines. Guess where that kind of tendency is useful. If you already like being organized, and your company wants you to be organized, you're probably going to be better at it than someone who doesn't like it.
Also, if you are conducting a major hiring effort to add 100 employees, your assertion probably is not true. 100 slightly above average employees will still better produce better overall organizational outcomes than 99 randomly hired employees and 1 exceptional one.
There are modern studies that show the same thing - intelligence test score means still differ by race, and intelligence tests are the best predictor of job performance that we know of, substantially better than knowledge tests or interviews. It creates a bit of a legal problem, considering Title VII. The best predictor of job performance that we know of usually shows mean racial differences.
Personality test score means don't differ by race however (NEO included), which is part of what makes them so attractive to HR.
Well, many people suggest taking anyone that appears to be cheating and either 1) not hire them, or 2) put them through a more rigorous interview process. If you can hire the non-cheaters for $10 per applicant, and then do a more rigorous interview (at whatever hourly rate the hiring manager earns) for those that might be cheating, the company is ultimately saving money on their hiring system, which is the purpose of using these tests in the first place.
And on that note, I would never suggest using personality tests in small businesses - the correlation between personality test scores and job performance is just too low for it to be justifiable unless you are introducing it into an environment in which hundreds of potential employees will be taking it (in which case, it should still be part of a multi-stage system).
That sounds like a company correctly testing a personality measure that they are considering adapting in the future, even if the test itself wasn't very good. This is one of the ways to ensure a test will be legally defensible - have every new employee take it, but don't hire them based on it. Then see if the personality test scores correlate with their job performance (usually as measured by supervisors) at some time later.
There is no spiritual ancestry in modern personality testing with the MBTI - it lacks the psychometric properties required of tests these days (reliability and validity). It is still used because the creators still want to make money off of it. Few industrial psychologists with any decent statistical training would be caught dead using it.
An example of a modern personality test that is currently used (and has been successfully legally defended) is the NEO-PI-R. Scores on several scales in this measure have been demonstrated to correlate with job performance across a variety of jobs.
This is actually hotly debated amongst industrial psychologists.
Vendors of personality tests include items that "detect" patterns of responses that appear to be due to this kind of cheating. They then look at these cheaters (the ones who are purposefully answer how a "good employee" would answer instead of with their own tendencies) and check their level of job performance. Oddly enough, there is a correlation - people who pad their responses to look like a "good employee" also tend to have higher job performance ratings, at least as it appears to their supervisors.
There are actually several validation techniques that you can use to do just that. Personality actually has a moderate but fairly consistent relationship with job performance across most job types.
The problem is that the shinyness surrounding personality in the business world these days makes a lot of organizations think that they can just write some questions about the kind of people they like, throw that into an online test, and hope for the best. This does not work, and is not usually legally defensible.
Also - discrimination is legal. Hiring someone with more work experience is discriminatory in nature. Discriminating against a protected class is not. But generally speaking, as long as the results of the personality test do not correlate with membership in a protected group (race, color, religion, sex, or national origin - see Title VII), or predict job performance differently between members of the various classes, then that is not a concern.
Experience always trumps education.
Grades are important, but only while you are competing against other recent college graduates. If a company is hiring a new IT person and has 10 recent graduates to look between, the one with the highest grades will be an easy call for an interview.
But that isn't the situation now.
Right now, we have laid off IT workers who have already had a job, sometimes years of them, and that experience (and demonstrated success at holding a job for a while) is more valuable than your schooling, and a 0.5 difference in GPA.
Someone liked them long enough to let them keep an IT job for some number of years. You, however, are an unknown factor. Thus, they are the safer bet.
They have already proven they can stick to a college degree long enough to get it (as have you). They have also proven they can be successful in a real IT environment. Thus, they are 2 for 2. You are 1 for 2.
Just get any IT job you can find, at least for now. Trade up when options are better. Don't hold out for your dream job now, or you might not get anything at all.
As a person who RTFA, you would know that they only experimented on monkeys who already showed equal preference between the colors before giving them the choice.
They collected data until they were confident that the monkey equally preferred all of the colors. THEN they forced the monkey to make a choice between the three. THEN, they recorded the monkey's color preference on subsequent choices. That is where they found that the monkey's color preferences had changed as a result of the forced choice (which is the rationalization for calling the whole thing "cognitive dissonance.")
That would imply that they can tell the difference, or else their preferences would not have changed after forcing a choice.