Effect sizes are underappreciated and often misinterpreted—the most common mistakes being to describe them in ways that are uninformative (e.g., using arbitrary standards) or misleading (e.g., squa...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2515245919847202

Obedience to Authority

Evaluating Effect Size in Psychological Research: Sense and Nonsense:

Psychology calls itself the science of behavior, and the American Psychological Association's current "Decade of Behavior" was intended to increase awareness and appreciation of this aspect of the science. Yet some psychological subdisciplines have never directly studied behavior, and studies on behavior are dwindling rapidly in other subdisciplines. We discuss the eclipse of behavior in personality and social psychology, in which direct observation of behavior has been increasingly supplanted by introspective self-reports, hypothetical scenarios, and questionnaire ratings. We advocate a renewed commitment to including direct observation of behavior whenever possible and in at least a healthy minority of research projects.

/pdf/psychology-as-the-science-of-self-reports-and-finger-1d190hyb2g.pdf

Psychology as the science of self-reports and finger movements: Whatever happened to actual behavior?

After decades of research it is now possible to offer a coherent, data-based theory of work motivation and job satisfaction. The present model combines aspects of the following theories: goal setting, expectancy, social-cognitive, attribution, job characteristics, equity, and turnover-commitment. The resulting model is called the high performance cycle. It begins with organizational members being faced with high challenge or difficult goals. If high challenge is accompanied by high expectancy of success or self-efficacy, high performance results, given that there is: commitment to the goals, feedback, adequate ability, and low situational constraints. High performance is achieved through four mechanisms, direction of attention and action, effort, persistence, and the development of task strategies and plans. High performance, if rewarding, leads to job satisfaction, which in turn facilitates commitment to the organization and its goals. The model has implications for leadership, self-management, and educa...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40062668.pdf

Work Motivation and Satisfaction: Light at the End of the Tunnel

Laboratory research on "error" in social judgment has largely supplanted research that addresses accuracy issues more directly. Moreover, this research attracts a great deal of attention because of what many take to be its dismal implications for the accuracy of human social reasoning. These implications are illusory, however, because an error is not the same thing as a "mistake." An error is a judgment of an experimental stimulus that departs from a model of the judgment process. If this model is normative, then the error can be said to represent an incorrect judgment. A mistake, by contrast, is an incorrect judgment of a real-world stimulus and therefore more difficult to determine. Although errors can be highly informative about the process of judgment in general, they are not necessarily relevant to the content or accuracy of particular judgments, because errors in a laboratory may not be mistakes with respect to a broader, more realistic frame of reference and the processes that produce such errors might lead to correct decisions and adaptive outcomes in real life. Several examples are described in this article. Accuracy issues cannot be addressed by research that concentrates on demonstrating error in relation to artificial stimuli, but only by research that uses external, realistic criteria for accuracy. These criteria might include the degree to which judgments agree with each other and yield valid predictions of behavior. The accuracy of human social judgment is a topic of obvious interest and importance. It is only natural to wonder to what degree the judgments we make of the personalities of ourselves and others might be right or wrong, and to desire to improve our accuracy. Nonpsychologists are often surprised and disappointed, therefore, when they begin to take psychology courses and discover that the field has largely foresworn interest in the accuracy issue. The discipline's early, direct interest in accuracy (e.g., Estes, 1938; Taft, 1955; Vernon, 1933) was all but completely stifled some years ago by the publication of a series of methodological critiques by Cronbach (1955), Hastorf and Bender (1952), and others. As a result, according to one authoritative textbook:

Obedience to Authority

Citations

Evaluating Effect Size in Psychological Research: Sense and Nonsense:

Psychology as the science of self-reports and finger movements: Whatever happened to actual behavior?

Work Motivation and Satisfaction: Light at the End of the Tunnel

Errors and Mistakes: Evaluating the Accuracy of Social Judgment

Wouldn’t it be nice? Predicting future feelings

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