I was listening to the news this morning and they had a piece about how many medical researchers are beholden to the makers of the products they’re testing. Furthermore, the major medical journals who publish this research are sometimes unable to deal with this potential bias. If the makers of Lipitor, for example, are paying researchers to study its effectiveness at reducing cholesterol relative to a competing drug, then that raises all kinds of questions about objectivity. Those questions can be dealt with, of course, and they need not mean that the research is worthless. You’ve just got to have safeguards and full disclosure to everyone, including the readers.
Interesting as all that was, I was more interested in the question of why we don’t do tests of specific products in I/O Psychology. If the medical field can conduct scientific research on name brand drugs and get them published in top-tier journals, why don’t we study off the shelf products used in the area of executive development, selection, and training?
I’m not talking about measuring So-And-So’s Five Factor Model of Implicit Leadership or a meta analysis of studies looking at conscientiousness. I want a team of crack psychologists to study Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People training and tell the world if it really does do what it says it does. Let them use lab rats if they need to. I want those same, objective scientists to study the jaunty Impact Hiring system or the use of the dreaded Meyers-Briggs.
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These kinds of studies are being done (well, some of them; I’m pretty sure nothing scientific has come within a hundred yards of a Covey seminar), but they’re being done by the test vendors and the consulting firms that sell them. Let me ask you: would you sooner trust a study on the effectiveness of St. John’s Wort put out by Walgreens or one put out by the Journal of the American Medical Association?
I/O psychologists really need to step up and wade in the mainstream more, even if it is polluted.
I have found ‘The 7 Habits’ book to be most useful in training managers. I’ve seen marked improvement in management performance by those who make these ‘habits’ their own.