New research: The most intelligent candidates don't always make the best employees.

Workplace research through the 20th Century suggested that selecting for intelligence is the best way to identify good performers. General mental ability (GMA), a popular recruitment measure that maps closely to the colloquial meaning of "intelligence", is strongly correlated with on-the job performance, well ahead of any other single measure.

This consistent finding came from studies that mostly defined job performance as carrying out the duties expected in that role. Although intuitive, this neglects two types of "extra-role" behaviours identified and studied in more recent years: citizenship behaviours, such as volunteering time or treating colleagues with courtesy; and counter-productive work behaviours, such as spreading rumours, shirking, or theft. Now a new meta-analysis suggests that GMA isn't the best predictor of these crucial aspects of performance. In fact, intelligence may be of little use in predicting who will behave badly at work - although it may predict who can get away with it.

The meta-analysis winnowed the available literature down to 35 relevant studies that looked at citizenship and counterproductive behaviours in real organisations. Intelligence (GMA) was correlated with engaging in more citizenship behaviours, but the association was far weaker than between intelligence and traditional task-based measures of performance. The researchers led by Erik Gonzalez-Mulé then cross-compared their results with previous meta-analyses focused on personality, and concluded that personality and GMA each account for about half the variance in citizenship behaviours. Put another way, you're just as likely to do good because you're inclined that way, as you are because you're smart.

Turning to counterproductive workplace behaviours, the authors predicted a relationship here with intelligence/GMA based on evidence from criminology that’s shown helping people see the consequences of their actions has an inhibitory effect on aberrant behaviour. In fact, the new analysis found no association between intelligence and aberrant behaviour. It's possible that this discrepancy with the criminology findings is because of differences in samples: there may be low-intelligence individuals who are more disposed to malfeasance, but they are underrepresented in workplaces because of adolescent anti-social issues, such as truancy or criminal behaviour. Meanwhile, personality, particularly the trait of agreeableness (but also conscientiousness and openness to experience) was strongly associated with unhelpful behaviours at work.

An interesting footnote - when self-ratings of counterproductive behaviour were removed from the analysis (leaving only third-party ratings), the results showed a significant relationship between intelligence and (fewer) unhelpful workplace behaviours. This means that smarter people report engaging in just as much bad behaviour as the rest of us, but others, such as work supervisors, notice less of it.

In summary, while GMA is the undisputed king of predicting better task performance, it holds equal footing with personality in predicting helpful, altruistic work behaviour, and cedes the ground almost entirely to personality for bad behaviour. Looking at performance as a composite of these three areas, Mulé's team conclude that when it comes to workplace selection, GMA still has a prominent role, but a much diminished one.

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Gonzalez-Mulé E, Mount MK, & Oh IS (2014). A Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between General Mental Ability and Nontask Performance. The Journal of applied psychology PMID: 25133304

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

New research: Pupils benefit from praise

There's a best practice guide for teachers, produced by the Association of School Psychologists in the US, that states praise is best given to pupils in private. This advice is not based on experimental research - there hasn't been any - but on surveys of student preferences, and on the rationale that pupils could be embarrassed by receiving praise in public.

Now, in the first study of its kind, John Blaze and his colleagues have systematically compared the effect of public and private praise (also known as "loud" and "quiet" praise) on classroom behaviour. They found that praise had a dramatic beneficial effect on pupils' behaviour, and it didn't matter whether the praise was private or public.

The research was conducted at four high-school public classrooms in rural south-eastern United States (the equivalent to state schools in the UK). The classes were mixed-sex, with a mixture of mostly Caucasian and African American pupils, with between 16 and 25 pupils in each class. The children were aged 14 to 16. Three of the teachers were teaching English, the other taught Transition to Algebra.

The teachers were given training in appropriate praise: it must be contingent on good behaviour; make clear to the pupil why they are being praised; immediate; and effort-based. During the test sessions of teaching, the teachers carried a buzzer on their belt that prompted them, once every two minutes, to deliver praise to one of their pupils, either loudly so the whole class could hear (in the loud condition) or discreetly, by a whisper in the ear or pat on the shoulder, so that hopefully only the child knew they were being praised (in the quiet condition). For comparison, there were also baseline teaching sessions in which the teachers simply carried out their teaching in their usual style.

Trained observers stationed for 20-minute sessions in the classrooms monitored the teachers' praise-giving and the behaviour of the pupils across the different conditions. They found that frequent praise increased pupils' on-task behaviours, such as reading or listening to the teacher, by 31 per cent compared with baseline, and this improvement didn't vary according to whether the praise was private or public. Frequent praise of either manner also reduced naughty behaviours by nearly 20 per cent.

Blaze and his team said that the debate over praise will likely continue, but they stated their results are clear: "both loud and quiet forms of praise are effective tools that can have dramatic effects at the secondary level." A weakness of the study is that the researchers didn't monitor the teachers' use of reprimands, which likely reduced as they spent more time delivering praise.

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Blaze JT, Olmi DJ, Mercer SH, Dufrene BA, & Tingstom DH (2014). Loud versus quiet praise: A direct behavioral comparison in secondary classrooms. Journal of school psychology, 52 (4), 349-60 PMID: 25107408

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

New research: Star performers suffer more than most from loss of status

Tiger Woods experienced a loss of status in 2009.
(He didn't win another major until 2012.)

Compared with lower-ranked people, those higher up the pecking order find it more difficult to stomach a drop in status, and their performance takes a bigger nosedive as a result. This is the verdict of a new article that presents experimental work, together with a more unusual source of evidence: major league baseball arbitration, in which players and clubs contest the players’ worth.

In many ways, individuals with high status are sitting pretty: more likely to receive praise, support, and positive influence from others; more likely to have positive life outcomes and perform better at work. You might expect them to be armed with the resources to cope with a threatening situation, such as being sidelined or demoted, and many psychologists would back you up.

But Jennifer Marr and Stefan Thau predicted that a status drop may have deeper repercussions for high-status individuals because their identity is likely to be more tied to their status, and identity threats suck up psychological resources and make focus harder.

Their first study examined 186 instances of baseball "final-offer arbitration" - a last-ditch contract renegotiation where the player and his club each make a proposal of his true worth for a third party to select between. In this adversarial situation, a club’s case often involves an indictment of the player’s health, team spirit, and temperament. A decision in favour of the club’s case therefore reflects a real status loss for the player. After controlling for player past performance and team results, Marr and Thau found that players ranked as high-status (based on awards and selection for All-Star Games) experienced a larger slump in their on-field performance following unfavourable arbitration.

Follow-up experimental work had participants recruited from a university pool interact in groups before completing a solo task (for example, some of them had to propose adjectives to describe the taste of a chocolate chip cookie). Between the group work and the solo challenge, some participants were told they’d sunk in the estimation of their teammates. This news led to poorer performance specifically for those participants who’d previously seen themselves as top dog, thanks to some rigged feedback they received earlier. When this status drop was followed by a positive self-affirmation exercise, those in the high status condition didn’t slump so badly on the final task, supporting the idea that the adverse effect is due to identity threat.

Taken together these findings suggest that when a high status person takes a tumble, a vicious cycle may result, with poor performance making further status drops possible. This is most likely for those who haven’t earned their status from superior ability and effort: once toppled, poseurs and Machiavellians may quickly slide into obsolescence. Legitimate high-status figures, with a track record of commitment and performance arguably deserve our attention and support. They should know that, perversely, a strong identification with their status could actually make it harder to hold onto it.
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Jennifer Carson Marr and Stefan Thau (2014). Falling from Great (and Not-So-Great) Heights: How Initial Status Position Influences Performance after Status Loss. Academy of Management Journal.

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

New research on lack of sleep

Short term, lack of sleep scrambles our mental functioning. Long term, the health consequences can be dire. What's stopping us from getting enough?

For many, adequate sleep is elusive because of sleep disorders, including varieties of insomnia. For others there are practical challenges - baby care or night shifts, for example. A new study focuses on another major, yet strangely overlooked, reason - bedtime procrastination. You want to go to bed early. You know you need to get to bed. And yet you stay up watching TV, playing video games or working late.

Floor Kroese and her colleagues surveyed over two thousand people (age range 16 to 93) in The Netherlands about their sleep habits and self-control. The participants also kept a seven-day sleep diary. All were free from medical sleep disorders or night shift jobs. Overall, the group averaged 7.2 hours sleep a night, but 17.5 per cent of them felt certain they didn't get enough sleep in general, and over 50 per cent believed they didn't get sufficient sleep on two nights or more a week.

Looking at the factors that were associated with insufficient sleep, demographics such as age and gender accounted for 8 per cent of the variation in sleep (being younger and female went hand in hand with less sleep), and external factors outside of one's control accounted for an additional 4.6 per cent. But the headline result is that 12.7 per cent of variation in sleep was explained by self-confessed bedtime procrastination - choosing to engage in activities even though it was time for bed. Lack of self control in general was also associated with insufficient sleep, but this was at least partly explained by co-occurrence of low self-control and greater bedtime procrastination.

"It can be speculated," the researchers said, "that people who have low self-regulation skills are more likely to keep watching the late night movie, or play yet another computer game despite knowing they might regret it the next morning when waking up tired."

Kroese and her team are careful to say this is speculation because their methodology does not prove there is a causal role for low self control and bedtime procrastination. It's possible - indeed likely -  that lack of sleep adversely affects self control, thus increasing bedtime procrastination. Nonetheless, it makes sense that the causality runs in both directions and that lack of sleep is for many a self-regulation problem.

If so, the researchers point out that this self-regulation perspective puts lack of sleep "on par with other health behaviour problems such as getting too little exercise, or making unhealthy food choices." This has implications not just for how we understand the problem, they explained, but also for highlighting potential interventions that could be borrowed from these other areas, such as the use of "if-then" plans. These rehearsed plans help overcome unhelpful habits by setting up new automatic routines or rules - such as, "if I'm feeling tired, then I will switch off the TV".

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Kroese, F., Evers, C., Adriaanse, M., & de Ridder, D. (2014). Bedtime procrastination: A self-regulation perspective on sleep insufficiency in the general population Journal of Health Psychology DOI: 10.1177/1359105314540014

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

New Research: What does it feel like to be depressed?

We're used to reading about depression as a checklist of symptoms. These lists have their uses, but arguably they miss the human story of what depression truly feels like. Now the psychologists Jonathan Smith and John Rhodes have published their analysis of the first-hand accounts of seven therapy clients, (three women and four men) about what it's like to be depressed for the first time. The participants had an average age of 44, and all had been referred for therapy in London.

The first theme to emerge from the interviews was the feeling of being "depleted" - in one's relationships, bodily, and in respect to the past and future. Ravi (names have been changed), who'd recently lost his job and separated from his wife, described his "relational depletion" like this:

You get into a state I think mentally where, you're just like out on an island ... You can see from that island another shore and all these people are there, but there's no way that you can get across [ ] or there is no way that you want to get across.

The idea of bodily depletion was conveyed by Sally, whose son had recently been imprisoned for nine years. "It's like part of you gone, your heart, I don't know. Perhaps half my heart has gone away." Later she adds: "I don't feel like I'm part of my body when I'm down. [ ] It's like something's gone inside me and swept my happiness away."

The feeling of the past and future being depleted (what the researchers call "temporal depletion") was captured by Paul: "I feel that everything I do, everything has been a waste." Pamela, who had been suspended from work, shared a similar sentiment:

I feel like sometimes my life is on hold. [ ] I'm going to be out of a job and that's my life over because [ ] [the company] has been my life for 20 years, you know, I've, I don't know anything else.

The second key theme to emerge from the interviews was of "being shaken" - including experiencing overwhelming emotions ("I was waiting for that fearfulness to come on like a wave," said Paul); frenzied thinking ("It feels like my brain is just racing all the time and I'm trying to think all the time," said Ravi); and the sense of an uncertain self. Regards this last point, Stewart (who'd lost access to his son after a divorce), put it like this:

Depression for me is not liking yourself, having no confidence in yourself, seeking reassurance, hanging onto anything that you can, pretty much anything emotionally, get your hands on. Lacking courage.

Reflecting on their analysis, Smith and Rhodes said it was clear that all the interviewees had in common that they felt alone, empty and that they had no future. The picture, the researchers explained, was not of a "steady, flat, fixed-state" but of a "fluctuating see-saw between long periods of descents into emptiness and moments of explosive emotion."

The authors summed up: "To feel oneself as not in relation, as not having a body and as not having a life or a future means that one is either lacking or questioning the very taken for granted qualities of human experience. This helps illuminate depression as a very powerful phenomenon which makes aberrant the most basic existential features of life."

The pair hope the insights from their research may have therapeutic implications - for example, they said an open discussion with clients of what depression entails could reassure them that their experiences are shared by others, and help to "make links between what is being felt now and what has happened to the person."

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Smith, J., and Rhodes, J. (2014). Being depleted and being shaken: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the experiential features of a first episode of depression Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice DOI: 10.1111/papt.12034

--further reading--
What's it like to have OCD?
Recovering patients describe their battles with an "anorexia voice"
What clients think CBT will be like and how it really is

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest

BBC Free Speech - Cardiff 23rd Sept

 My name is Charlie, I’m one of the producers on Free Speech (BBC3’s version of Question Time). We’re coming to Cardiff on the 23rd September where we’ll be discussing (amongst other topics) feminism. We are a current affairs debate show and our audience sets the agenda, we love to hear from the people you work with about what they’d like to see debated and invite them to join our audience.

 

We are looking for people between 16-34 who have opinions on current affairs and want to have their voices heard! We usually have 4 debates, tell us what you’d like to talk about. It’s your show, your chance to join in with the national conversation.

 

Here is an application link to be an audience member: http://tinyurl.com/o87kjsw

 

It would be great if some of your young members were interested in taking part, we will be setting up a live TV studio at   Cardiff City Hall, Cathays Park, Cardiff CF10 3ND. We ask our audience to arrive for 17:30 to be ready for the live show between 20:00 – 21:00 on BBC 3.

 

Please forward this to anyone you know who might want to join us in the audience encourage them to apply!

 

If you would like to speak further you can reach me on: 0207 258 6709