Can you help me out with a messy research-related question?

What are the best ways to set boundaries around subsets of an “extended organization”, and then give these subsets names so that they are easy to talk about?

The problem seems on the surface looks like a question of semantics (i.e., what to call it). But it’s more than that, since the terms of expression need to be founded on some kind of principle of composition. I need help with both the semantics and the principle(s).

When we’re talking about a network of coordinated, interdependent economic actors, how do we decide which of these actors should be considered part of the organization and which of these actors should be considered outside the organization?

And, how do we name the groups within different levels of boundaries, in a way that’s easy to comprehend and makes sense conceptually?

And the biggest issue:

How do we refer to “the organization” without automatically dismissing the sense of connection that any particular actor might feel, and without diminishing his/hers/its valid status as “part of” the organization?

(Note, I can’t call it The Organization because (ultimately, though not now) I want speak of it as its real self, by name, and not just talk about it as a theoretical organization.)

Here’s the situation:

“The Organization” in question is the core entity and the largest entity in a community of commerce / commercial network of businesses. All of the businesses are interdependent economic partners.  The core organization cannot exist without the co-commercial organizations. And, although some of these entities have revenue streams and commitments to entities outside the extended organization, most of them depend on the incorporated organization for key elements of their value chain.

The incorporated organization is big-ish (400 employees), and the co-commercial entities are small (1 to 10 employees) concerns. Some are incorporated or LLCs.

What I’m talking about this extended organization, I need to name three things:

• The incorporated organizational entity, which is incorporated and has a CEO, and directly employs individuals (that all get W-2 income from their work in the organization).

• The extension of the organization that includes not just the W-2 employees of the incorporated organization but also includes all of the co-commercial partners whose participation is critical to the incorporated entity.

Because the incorporated organization relies so heavily on these co-commercial partners, it’s hard to think of them as not being part of “the organization”. In fact, lots of these partners describe themselves as being part of “the organization”, and are often seen that way by customers and outsiders. If you asked a customer or a random person on the street who The Organization was, they’d likely include the co-commercial partners and maybe not even know that they were not completely part of the incorporated organization.

• The community of commerce, which includes not only the incorporated organization and its co-commercial partners but also includes the customers that interact with partners.

Do economic or financial dimensions work as complete decision rules?

In my description above, of the different layers/levels/subsets of “the organization”, I’ve defaulted to using legal & financial categories to set the boundaries. For example, the incorporated organization vs the intended one. Another similar strategy is distinguish between entities financially, by using who issues the W-2 to whom as a way to separate the pieces.

The easiest way for me to distinguish the boundary is to consider the legal entities–whether they are incorporated or not, and then to consider who is attached to each Inc. entity, based on their W-2 income.

But these dimensions and boundaries are defined by purely financial criteria – which isn’t enough to really define “the organization” if organizations are more than just economic machines. Categories like sources of revenue, origin of income for individuals, and legal status don’t reflect any particular sense of social agreement, such as the beliefs of participants about who the organization is or isn’t.

I’m willing to use the financial criteria to establish qualitatively different boundaries that include more or less of the network’s participants, but once I do that I still have the problem of …

What do I call the different entities?

I have to start with the core organization’s real name, so that outsiders can sort of know what I’m talking about. My daughter suggested “Pluto” as the nom de recherche for this organization, so Pluto has to be part of it. (Or not, you can convince me otherwise).

I could call the three key groupings Pluto Incorporated, Pluto Extended, and Pluto Community.

The method for distinguishing groupings can’t put any particular group down. In other words, there can’t be a master category (e.g., President) and a few marked categories (e.g., Female President), because adding the modifier to only some of the categories makes them subordinate. SO, I can’t do Pluto, Pluto Extended, and Pluto Community.

And, I need a method to refer to them that feels reasonably seamless, and is not clunky or cumbersome. This is made me think about using subscripts, to call it Pluto -I, Pluto-X, Pluto-C. (note, I can’t format a subscript in wordpress — techfail on my part)

But does this look dumb or distracting in print?

Self-Determination and Psychological Connection

Finally, a perfect solution would be to have a naming system that was related to how the different people (and the entities they are part of) think of themselves in relation to “the organization”. How could the names reflect the group that think of themselves and each other at “the organization” when this includes the core organization and some but not all of its co-commercial partners?

Even though the I, X, and C designations map onto financial distinctions, they don’t tell the reader anything about the sentiments or relationships among the actual people I’m referring to. For example, to talk about Pluto-I when I’m talking about things other than revenue/finances, such as the effort of “the people who think of themselves as ‘the organization’ and who are all working together”.

Theoretically, I could make a fourth group that includes all the people who think of themselves as being part of Pluto.

Maybe Pluto-| could stand for Psychologically Pluto?

Making distinctions of who’s in or out based on members’ psychological self-assessments, by asking them whether or not they consider themselves “in” the organization, makes sense when we’re trying to capture or talk about their psychological (that is, non-economic) motivations. But, since I’m an outside researcher who can’t survey the sense of membership of all the entities in the network, I’d always be referring to this group as a theoretical one with a boundary that hasn’t been firmly established.uld always be a blurry group.

Any thoughts on how to parse these distinctions in a way that’s conceptually clear, emotionally inclusive, and textually simple?

I’d love your suggestions ..

Image: B’okay on Flickr ??? Some rights reserved by HarshPatel;Photographer

When it comes to discriminating against women, you’d think that only sexist organizations would be involved.   But did you ever imagine that meritocracies would encourage managers to discriminate against women?

Research conducted by Emilio Castilla and Stephen Benard, published last year in Administrative Science Quarterly, documents a disturbing dynamic that the authors call “The Paradox Of Meritocracy”. In their rigorous set of empirical studies, they found that

When an organization is explicitly presented as meritocratic, individuals in managerial positions favor a male employee over an equally qualified female employee by awarding him a larger monetary reward. (p 543)

Although these meritocratic organizations aren’t explicitly encouraging managers to discriminate, they seem to be inadvertently freeing managers to demonstrate gender bias when they award raises and bonuses.

This discovery is distressing. The Paradox of Meritocracy casts doubt on a range of efforts that organizations are using to try to reduce gender discrimination.

Meritocracies and Why We Love Them

We love meritocracies. We love the idea that organizations will link members’ career success to their actual performance.  We love meritocracies because we think that merit is the fairest, most objective way to reward some people (meritorious ones) over others. After all, meritocracies explicitly reject the idea that a member’s gender, race, sexual orientation, age, or other social category should influence how that member is evaluated and rewarded.

Managers, leaders and HR experts especially love meritocracies. They enthusiastically advocate for merit-based systems because they believe that tying rewards to performance evaluation motivates people to work harder. Not only that, but linking merit and pay also increases employees’ satisfaction with their work-reward ratio and with the organization itself.

Linking Organizational Rewards to Individual Merit

As organizations have tried to increase fairness and decrease discrimination, they have emphasized practices that create a formal link between evidence-based performance evaluations and  promotions / pay increases.

One strategy has been to shift to ‘pay for performance’, where there is an explicit link between performance rating and pay increases. A second strategy has been to decouple the performance evaluation conversation from the salary decision, so that a manager is not unintentionally thinking about both of these when considering a candidate.

Unfortunately, merit-based rewards in organizations don’t seem to do what we’ve hoped.

Merit Pay Does Not Reduce Gender-based Pay Discrimination.

Despite the intent behind them, there is a consistent problem with merit-based practices: Women and minority men in the same organization, in the same job, and with the same supervisor, are found to receive lower salary increases than white men, even after same performance evaluation score (Castilla 2008).

Let me repeat that: It has been empirically demonstrated that:

Women and minority men in the same organization, in the same job, and with the same supervisor, received lower salary increases than white men, even after same scores on their performance evaluations (Castilla 2008).

Research on merit-based pay practices has consistently demonstrated that merit-based practices do not achieve gender- or race-neutral outcomes.

Is it the practices themselves, or something else that allows for bias? In their research, Castilla and Benard shifted focus to consider the role of organizational context. They aimed to compare what happens in organizations that strive to be meritocratic versus those that do not.

Most people would expect that organizations that strive to be meritocratic would do better at reducing gender-based pay gaps. But what Castilla and Benard discovered was exactly the opposite.

Highlighting the organization’s commitment to being meritocratic actually made gender-based pay discrimination worse.

The question is — why? Why do these merit oriented practices, meant to increase fairness, end up increasing discrimination?

The Role of The Organization in Supporting Biased Actions by Individuals

Castilla and Banard propose that there is something about the organization’s intent to focus on merit that leads organization members not to focus on merit.  Their interpretation is, essentially, that when people are primed or reminded to feel unbiased, fair or objective by the organization itself, they feel freed to express the bias that they personally hold.

“Managers embedded in meritocratic contexts may experience higher confidence that their decisions are impartial, leading them to feel less motivated or to invest less effort in avoiding the application of stereotypes.” (p. 568)

“Moral Credentialing”

Castilla and Benard propose that one mechanism that explains the paradox of meritocracy is “moral credentials”. When people have established their moral credential as an unbiased person, they are more prone to express biased attitudes. It’s as though they’ve already proven to themselves – and others- that they aren’t unbiased.  However, when these supposedly unbiased people act, they reveal real bias and discriminate against others. (Monin & Miller, 2001)

In addition to the straightforward credentialing mechanism that Castilla & Benard suggest, there are two other mechanisms that work in similar ways that also might be letting managers feel free to express bias in their decisions.

Moral Credentialing by Association  

The ‘My Best Friend is X’ Effect. We know that individuals often feel that they have achieved their ‘I’m not prejudiced‘ bona fides by claiming to have relationships with the (potential) target group of discrimination. Some individuals even claim that they are not discriminatory (e.g., not racist, not sexist) because they obviously have a close association with specific members of the target group.

I like to call this the “My Best Friend is X” effect, after the most common statement people make to claim Moral Credential by Association.

Vicarious Moral Credentialing

We give ourselves moral credentials for being unbiased not only through actual relationships with others, but also through vicarious relationships with others. A study just published by Maryam Kouchaki demonstrates that individuals license or credential themselves vicariously, through identification with others who have “established non-prejudiced credentials”. Both the mechanism of association and the mechanism of identification might give managers the cover of moral credentials.

Do Organizations Provide Managers with “Vicarious Moral Credentialing”?

The idea of moral credentials influencing behavior has previously only been discussed as an individual phenomenon– something that a person does for him- or herself.

What’s new with the Paradox of Meritocracy studies is the idea that the organization itself can provide a halo of moral credentials for its managers.

The managers don’t need to think of themselves as being unbiased — they just have to think of their organization as unbiased or meritocratic. Then, the organization creates a halo for managers through three slightly different but distinct psychological tricks, when managers can:

1. Think of their organization as being meritocratic and thus assume that bias has already been removed,
2. Think that they are meritocratic because they are part of an organization that is meritocratic, and
3. Think that they are like their organization, so that if it’s meritocratic, so are they.

In all three cases, managers no longer have any motivation to avoid applying biased stereotypes or to monitor their own expressions of bias. They are off the hook.

What can organizations do about the paradox of meritocracy?

Castilla and Benard suggest that organizations can try to counter the paradoxical dynamics of meritocracy by (1) increasing transparency around evaluations and salaries, (2) by increasing accountability, and (3) by reducing managerial discretion. While I’m not a fan of reducing discretion, it makes sense to have managers be more accountable for their decisions about other people’s merit and the appropriate award for that merit.

1. Organizations should report out historical patterns of evaluation and pay increase data, for each individual manager.

Managers need to become more accountable for knowing and monitoring their own personal patterns of behavior regarding evaluating and rewarding others. Organizations can help individuals to hold themselves accountable by providing each manager with an historical summary and analysis of pay and evaluation decisions, broken out by gender, race and other diversity criteria of the persons evaluated. This way, managers can see their decisions over time, and note whether their pattern of behavior is unbiased or not.

2. Organizations can examine pay and promotion practices for design issues that make decision patterns more transparent while evaluations and awards are being made.

I can’t put my fingers on an old and useful study contrasting two methods of evaluating performers and the different effects on decision making, but… The study examined the evaluations of male and female managers, and varied whether the evaluations were made one at a time (i.e., single processing) or in groups (i.e., batch processing).

When people were evaluated one at a time, gender bias was demonstrated more often in the evaluation and reward decision. In contrast, when people were evaluated in groups, discrimination was significantly reduced. The researchers explained that in the ‘batch process’ scenario, decision-makers could actually see their gender bias in action (e.g., they could see that in 6 decisions out of 7, they were favoring the male over the female). In contrast, when decisions were made one at a time, decision managers forgot how often they rewarded a man over a woman. Batch processing might create a useful kind of real-time transparency, letting people see, evaluate and interrupt their own trend of bias.

3. Organizations can teach managers to be more mindful when they evaluate merit and rewards.

By mindful, I mean in the strictest sense, where ‘mindful’ is understood to as being not only active but also analytical about the way that they are processing information– but as seeking out and making novel distinctions. “Mindfulness is expressed in active (versus automatic) information processing, characterized by cognitive differentiation.” (Langer, 1989) What this means is that managers need triggers that interrupt automatic thinking and that force them to consider their decision criteria critically.

4. Organizations should investigate the degree to which they are actually meritocratic.

Do organizations that are actually meritocratic have managers that consistently make decisions that damage women and minority men? No. So organizations need to be transparent and hold themselves responsible for the effectiveness of programs intended to create a meritocratic organization. Organizations need to display their ‘diversity data’ internally (i.e., be transparent) and monitor to correct any patterns of bias (e.g., hold themselves responsible) in organization-wide decisions. They need to teach managers what it means to be meritocratic, and how to make decision based on merit while excluding irrelevant data. Organizations need to monitor the degree to which their claims of meritocracy map onto the outcomes of supposedly merit-based decisions.

The Paradox of Meritocracy shows that the link between an organization claiming to be a meritocracy and actually being a meritocracy contradicts reality.

Meritocracies hurt women because claims that decisions are based on merit can hide decisions that are gender-biased.

These claims of being non-sexist, non-racist, and non-discriminatory are not only false, but they can also increase bias by letting managers think that vigilance is not longer necessary.

The opposite is true –

Any organization claiming to be a meritocracy has to sustain and validate that claim by holding itself and its members accountable for unbiased, merit-based decisions, or risk being hypocritical and inauthentic.

See also:

Want More Women on Tech & TED Panels? Reject Meritocracy and Embrace Curation

References

Castilla, Emilio J., and Benard, Stephen. (2010). “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 55: 543-576.

Monin, B. & Miller, D. T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 33-43.

Bradley-Geist, J.C., King, E.B., Skorinko, J., Hebl, M.R., & McKenna, C. (2010). Moral credentialing by association: The importance of choice and relationship closeness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 1564-1575.

Kouchaki M, (2011). Vicarious moral licensing: the influence of others’ past moral actions on moral behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4): 702-15.

Also, this discussion focuses on gender-based discrimination because that’s what was directly tested in the study’s experiments. However, the logic holds for other forms of social prejudice, such as prejudices against people of a given race, sexual orientation, gender performance, physical ability, and so on, that have no actual effect on an individual’s performance.

Images:
–  Figure 4, The Paradox of Meritocracy, with updated non-meritocratic condition vs. meritocratic condition, p. 566.
– Stephen Colbert, with his “Best Black friend” Alan, claims moral credentialing by association.
– Nerd Merit Badges from– you guessed it– Nerd Merit Badges

I am so excited about the class I’m teaching this fall that I’m breaking down the Chinese wall between serious topical blog posts and the practical fun of my work life, to post this Call for Projects for my students.

I’m hoping that some of you readers in the New York/ New Jersey/Hoboken area may know someone, or some organization, that would be interested in sponsoring a team of student consultants who are ready to help you with a business & technology challenge.  Read on for the details, share widely, and let me know if you’re interested.

Also, if you’d like to be a guest speaker for the class (Thursdays 4 to 6), let me know. I’ll put up a separate post for that.  Many many thanks in advance for your help.

Call For Projects:
Consulting Practicum in Business & Technology 411/412

The Faculty of the Howe School of Technology Management in Stevens Institute of Technology is seeking projects that combine business and technology challenges for student teams in our 4^th Year Consulting Practicum, over the Fall 2011 and Spring 2012 sessions.

We are looking for projects where multi-disciplinary teams of 5 students can consult with your organization in a way that contributes towards your business while challenging the students with important, real world business and technology issues.

We are hoping to identify several potential projects by the first week of September 2011.

 How the Practicum Projects Work

 Project Sponsors identify a business problem or opportunity, often with a technology component, where they’d like fresh eyes, thoughtful analysis, a strategic plan, and support for executing that plan.  Sponsors provide student teams with general direction, access to information and key stakeholders, and occasional advice. Student teams meet with the Sponsor to agree on project deliverables, to get a midpoint update, and to receive the team’s analysis and recommendations (in Fall 2011). Teams will work with sponsors to execute plans (in Spring 2012).

Students’ work on your project is supervised by Stevens faculty. The student team’s work on your project will be supported by weekly class sessions, where students will develop their consulting, project management, and business planning skills. And, each week the students will ‘workshop’ their project with other student teams so that they can draw on the insights of their peers. Students may also be advised by faculty members with relevant business and technology expertise.

Benefits of Sponsoring a Practicum Project

Organizations that sponsor a Practicum Project gain:

• Focused, dedicated work on projects that address a specific issue important to you
• Leading edge thinking and practice from student teams, supported by the intellectual and professional resources of the Howe School of Business and Stevens community
• Data, analyses and recommendations, as well as support with project execution

Your organization will benefit from the efforts of a diversely talented student team who will bring new insight, great enthusiasm, technical expertise, and a can-do attitude to your business challenge.  The students will draw on their coursework and their practical experience, as well as the resources of the Stevens community, to address your business challenge.

Sponsors will enjoy the chance to contribute to the students’ learning and help to develop a new generation of business & technology leaders. And, you’ll contribute to the Stevens community as a business liaison.

Types of Consulting Projects We Seek

Practicum projects can run the gamut from conceptual questions (e.g., is there a market for this tool?) to execution plans (e.g., how can we get this technology adopted by reluctant users?).  While we especially encourage projects that have some technology component, the role of technology depends on the specific business challenge. Projects may have:

-       Technology as a component of the recommendation (e.g., how can we use social media to raise community awareness?)

-       Technology as the expected product, where the team’s challenge is to design something to meet a market or community need

-       Technology as the presenting problem, where the team’s challenge is to find better ways to use tools, systems or data, or

-       Technology as the business opportunity itself, (e.g., a product to be commercialized) where the team helps turn the technology into a business.

 For projects that may have no specific “technology” component at the outset, the student team will identify whether and where technology might make a difference.

(For ideas, please see the list of brief descriptions of previous projects, below.)

 Practicum projects may involve any functional areas of your organization — including HR/OD, strategy, marketing, engineering, finance, R&D, or operations.  The Sponsor and Student Team, with the help and approval of the Practicum faculty, will craft a project that furthers both the objectives of your organization and the learning goals of the Business & Technology Program.

Do you have an interesting business challenge that you’d like help with?

If you have a business challenge – especially one with a technology component – that might be appropriate for a Practicum and you would like to sponsor a student team, we would love to talk with you.

Please email the Practicum faculty member, Dr. CV Harquail, at cvharquail@gmail.com.  Please tell us:

• Your name, title, preferred email address and phone number
• Business/organization name
• A 2-3 sentence description of the organizational issue that you think a student team might address for you
• Any questions you might have about the practicum process

We’ll work with you to scope the project to fit your needs.

Previous Projects Have Included:

-       Developing a marketing & adoption plan for a public service smartphone app

-       Creating a sales & marketing plan for a 3-D imaging machine, including market analysis, customer identification (lead generation), and developing print & video marketing materials

-       Developing a Customer Relationship Management System (a digital application) for a local retailer, in part by extracting data from a point of sale system, and in part by understanding local customers and consumption trends.

-       Conducting a feasibility analysis for a technology derived from a faculty member’s patent, and then developing a full start-up business plan

-       Creating a ‘green business plan’ for an organization competing for grant money

-      Developing a community emergency preparedness plan, with a focus on delivering emergency supplies, including site recommendations and supply inventory levels

-       Developing a social media strategy for a community services organization, with a corresponding plan for supporting this strategy with revised staff roles and training

I bet you don’t think it does.

I bet you think that your social media policy, and your ‘create a blog for our business using other people’s user-generated content’- approach, is impervious to racism masked as business advice, as research findings, or as interesting content.

I bet that’s exactly what PsychologyToday.com thought, too.

They’ve got a stable of bloggers, most of them PhD psychologists and social psychologists, who supposedly are “qualified” to write for their site. These scientists generate content for them, so that PsychologyToday.com can draw traffic and sell advertising space.

But not all of these scientists practice a high quality of “science”. And one of these scientists, already notorious for the social bias in his “research” “findings”, recently published a post that was decidedly not scientific.

Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist who styles himself as “The Scientific Fundamentalist” published a post entitled “Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?

This content was decidedly “off brand” for Psychology Today. It was a clear display of racism, masquerading as science.

Readers were offended, and the post was taken down by PsychololgyToday.com’s editors — but not until after a lot of damage was done.

Damaged were Psychology Today’s reputation, the reputations of PsychologyToday.com ‘s other contributors, the trust of PsychologyToday.com readers, and the support of social media influences who drive traffic to PsychologyToday.com.

Damaged were the Black community, people of color and white people who are working against racism.

Also damaged were the Black women whose beauty and social value was “scientifically” deemed inadequate.

Indeed, it’s hard to see that anyone benefited from PsychologyToday.com’s social media policy.

Except, of course, racists.

But PsychologyToday.com has some form of social media policy –

Someone over at PsychologyToday.com organized the post contribution system, where bloggers get access to PsychologyToday’s audience in exchange for publishing their individual content. Someone set up the digitized and interpersonal processes for gathering and vetting contributors. Someone permitted this particular “scientist “, a scientist with a suspect reputation, to publish his posts on PsychologyToday.com.

Someone did all of this without the help of a fully-considered social media policy.

Do you have a “someone” at your organization who’s in charge of putting content on your blogs? On your Facebook page? In your online community? On Twitter?

Does this “someone” use guidelines that specify who your business or organization brand is, what it believes in, and how it should be represented through this content? Does this someone have programs to teach contributors to uphold your standards?

Does your social media policy let contributors and your community know what you stand for, and what you won’t stand for?

Action Step: Sign this petition at Change.org Psychology Today: Stop Publishing Racist & Sexist Articles
The petition’s focus:

We demand that the Psychology Today editorial board publicly account for how and why this racist and sexist article was allowed to be published on the Psychology Today website, and take transparent steps to prevent this from happening in the future.

For great insights on the original article and reactions to it, see:

Why Black Women Rock! My Thoughts That Crazy Psychology Today Article By Dr. Phoenyx Austin on Curlynikki.com
A ‘Wow. Just. Wow’ article: ‘Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women? by Pam Spaulding at PamsHouseBlend
Beauty May Be In Eye of Beholder But Eyes See What Culture Socializes by Mikhail Lyubansky, Ph.D. at PsychologyToday.com

Voices: The Satoshi Kanazawa Study & Repeat Offender: Satoshi Kanazawa’s Other Greatest Misses by Arturo R. Garcia at Racialicious

See also:

What Authenticity? Design Homophobia Out of the Organization

“Manager A’s results with the department’s implementation of Program X were outstanding, but her internal Klout score is only a 43. Given her low influence score, it looks like she’s not as good a leader as Manager B.

I know that Manager B has been with us only two years, and hasn’t yet finished Program Y, but look– her Klout score is 65! That’s huge! Clearly, she’s a better leader than Manager A. If we’re chosing between the two, let’s promote Manager B.”

Can you imagine a conversation like this happening in your organization, where managers are evaluated and compared against each other based on their (internal) social media scores?

I can imagine it, and the prospect scares me. Given management’s pressure to quantify, their lack of understanding of what internal social media is and how it should be used, and their worship of abstract concepts of “leadership” and “influence, it concerns me that organizations will misuse these ‘measures’ of online social influence and treat them as objective evidence of performance.

“Social scoring”, as I’m discussing it here, includes any kind of single measure, profile or dashboard that evaluates a person’s use of social media tools (e.g., Yammer, Chatter, Twitter) within their work organization and/or among their organization’s stakeholders. These scores would be like enterprise versions of  Klout or PeerIndex– designed to measure someone’s online influence.

It’s only a matter of time before Social Scoring moves inside our Social Organizations.

Social media is moving into organizations, making organizations more “Social”.

We may be struggling with the terminology to describe digitally-media networked communications tools (be they “social media”, “social networks”, “Systems of Engagement”, or “work media“), but these networked, enterprise-wide tools (hereafter, social media networks) are already in place in many organizations. In other organizations, these tools are emerging and/or being imported.

More and more organization members, regardless of their place in the organizational hierarchy or work process flow, now have access to these social media networks and are using these tools. Thus, more and more people are involved in online social activity that can be evaluated empirically.

Social Scoring is increasingly available.

Social scoring is an emerging mini-industry. Social scoring is already being used to to evaluate the performance of people in certain kinds of roles (e.g., as brandividuals, as industry thought leaders, as celebrity endorsers, as influential customers ). Within some specific external career markets (e.g., social media marketing itself) candidates are being hired for their social scores.

Despite important concerns about the quality of social scoring systems, appropriate metrics and ethical use in marketing, social scoring is pervading other organizational functions too.

Why is Social Scoring invading the Social Organization?

• Social media networks facilitate the relationships that make individual leadership possible.

Because social media network tools make it possible to reach more people, more quickly, more efficiently, and more often — we expect to see leaders using these tools to create meaning, to reach out to others, and to connect with organization members. We expect to see individual leaders using these tools to influence how members think and what members do.

• Social engagement tools facilitate important organizational work.

In addition to creating and maintaining relationships through which work gets done, social media networks help to inform and focus organization members on organization-level values and goals.

• Inside organizations, we are anxious (desperate?) to evaluate rising leaders as soon as possible.

We want to identify people who seem to have what it takes to become leaders, and we want to invest in these people. Social scores may help us identify leaders we have overlooked.

• It’s hard to evaluate employees on their performance in a way that seems fair to everyone.

Thus, we look for tools that help to make these evaluations more “objective”. Scores — taken literally at face value– give the appearance of being objective, in part because they subsume the qualitative, subjective evaluation criteria into a number. And certainly, everyone agrees that a ’43′ to is less than a ’65′, regardless of the underlying criteria, right?

• It’s hard to compare individual employees, with their unique histories, to each other.

But social scores help with that, by turning oranges and apples into numbers. We use these numbers to compare very different people, in different functions and at different ranks in the organization, on (what appear to be) the same set of relevant criteria.

All this would all be fine, if these scores measured what mattered to being influential within an organization. But they don’t.

Before we start using Social Scoring to evaluate individual influence, contribution and performance within our social organizations, we need to reconsider what social scoring measures, what it doesn’t measure, and why that matters.

7 Reasons to ReThink Social Scoring inside Organizations

1. Not everyone becomes socially influential by using social media OR by directing their influence efforts to audiences that are online.

Many relationships are made and maintained by purely non-digital interactions, like face-to-face coaching conversations, or speaking up in a meeting may make an individual influential but may never be measured by a social media metric. Moreover, not everyone who is or may need to be influenced is available online

3. Social scores show only a part of the picture of social influence.

Even when measures are carefully constructed, they can exclude dimensions that are important to one person but not another, to one department and not another, to one organization and not another.

2. Considering digital behaviors alone, people build strong relationships in different ways.

A particular online behavior may be preferred by one employee but not another. A particular online behavior may be used for different purposes by different people. For example, to encourage a colleague and show support, one person might prefer to use a retweet while another person might prefer to cheer the colleague on ( e.g., “#WayToGo, Brownstone!) A social score might weigh one behavior as more influential than another. But, which one of these behaviors is more effective, and which one should count more?

4. Online influence may not be used in pursuit of the right goals, yet may be measured as though it is.

Social media networks, and thus social scoring, are goal agnostic. A social score does not tell us whether or not a person is getting the right job done.

That one manager might get a lot of retweets for that lolcat picuture, but has his social influence resolved conflicts in the distribution system? Social scores may distract our attention from considering whether the activity has served an important goal: What is this person using his or her influence for? Are they focusing on building influence for themselves or moving others towards the organization’s shared goals? Not everyone uses social influence in service of collective and strategic goals, so a social score can’t really tell us about job performance.

5. Specific measures themselves may be used for the wrong purposes.

For example, many tools that were created to diagnose strengths and weaknesses to help a manager grow are often misused to evaluate that manager.

We’ve all see people judged as being better or worse for something due to their Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a tool that is too often mistakenly described as a “score”. And, I’ve recently seen social network analyses of specific managers used to assess the performance of those managers, when the point of the analysis was only to identify relationships they might want to build to get certain kinds of work done.

6. We forget too easily what these scores actually measure. We also forget what they don’t measure. Ultimately, we lose sight of what these social scores actually mean.

Once a measure has been created — even though we “know” all the caveats and the biases involved — we begin to treat those meaures as being more valid (measuring what we think they measure), more accurate (measuring correctly), and more meaningful that they actually are.

Social media tools are means to an end that can get confused with the end itself.

7. We over-rely on social scores because we don’t understand the processes they measure.

We grope for measures that make it easy to evaluate what we struggle to fathom with our own own analysis of the ‘data’. When we can’t understand what really makes someone influential, and how influential someone is relative to others, we rely on measures like Klout scores. Worse, once we have the scores they are easy to use as a crutch so that we avoid ever having to learn what the scores really tell us.

We may not really understand what Klout measures (despite Klout’s own efforts to make the scores more informational.) But we can compare a ’43′ to a ’65′ and know who’s better. At least, we think we can.

The Future of Social Scoring for the Social Organization?

These seven caveats of social scoring should help us realize that embracing social scoring simply because it’s available is the wrong thing to do for our organizations and our colleagues.

Rather than rushing to embrace social scoring, we need to recognize what social scoring currently is and re-envision what it could be. We need to make sure that social scoring offers useful, meaningful information about each other and about our own organizations.

We desperately want to know who in our organization is making a difference. We want to find those rising stars, thought leaders, and influential influencers. Especially, we want to be able to give people credit for the social work that they do online.  Social scoring can be part of this process, but only once we made social scoring fit our organizations’ explicit needs.

We need to create second-generation scoring tools that evaluate online influence behaviors that are important to our organizations, that help get work done, and that lead members towards shared goals.

See also:

The Quantification of Individual Social Equity, by Geoff Livingston
Klout: Do You Have Enough Influence to Get the Job? by Michelle Tripp at BrandForward
Why Klout doesn’t count: putting social media influence in context, by Matt Owen
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning

Image of figure skating judges’ scorecard, on eHow’s How Competitive Figure Skating Works.

The idea that CEO Daddies of Daughters will help us close the gender wage gap is completely misleading. This idea encourages us to buy into CEO Daddy “Feminism”, which is just another way to allow business men (and women) to avoid taking responsibility for gender equity in the workplace.

When solid but small bits of research get big buzz about nothing actionable, my inner curmudgeon comes out. Given the play that a recent study is getting, all about how having a daughter makes a male CEO deal with the gender wage gap, the curmudgeon must speak:

The unpublished working paper has been blogged, featured on Yahoo news, and discussed in the Wall Street Journal Review Section (the ‘thinking’ section of the WSJ), all because of this finding:

A new, not-yet-published study that tracked 12 years of wage data in Denmark finds that when male CEOs had daughters, their female employees’ wages went up 1.3 percent while their male employees only gained .8 percent raises. So the birth of a daughter effectively shrunk the male-female wage gap by .5 percent on average. (emphasis mine)

And the takeaway is supposed to be this:

When a daughter is born to a CEO, the male-female wage gap at his company is reduced.

Ergo, having a daughter makes a man more likely to use his professional power to make the world of work a better place for women. Having a baby girl makes a CEO Daddy a Feminist.

Interesting spin, isn’t it. Let’s investigate.

Does having a baby girl really make a difference? A real difference?

Let’s look closely at the study itself.  The spin starts with the way that the finding is presented.  Although the finding is statistically significant, the size of the effect is small. Said another way, the relationship between Daddy CEO having a Girl and reduction in the gender wage gap is not a function of chance.  And, it  doesn’t make much of a real world difference.

On average, the decrease was .5%  (yes, half of one percent). In the best case scenario, in a small company (less than 50 employees) where the CEO’s first born child is a girl, the impact of her birth on that CEO Daddy’s actions towards women’s pay is very small — a decrease in the wage gap of 2.8%. In real dollars, this means that in a company where a man has been paid $100 and a woman has been paid $82, her wages would go up a whopping $2.80.

Post-daughter, post-CEO Feminist enlightenment, the woman makes only $15.20 less than the man who makes $100.

And, if we depend on CEO Daddys, it will take a long time to reach pay equity. To close an 18% wage gap, it would take a company 7 CEOs, (avg. CEO tenure 7 years), each with a first-born daughter, each improving the wage gap by 2.8% per CEO, a full 49 years.

The Research itself isn’t the Problem.

On the plus side, this research does demonstrate empirically that the change in attitudes towards women by new fathers of daughters, already documented in social psychological studies, is likely to exist in the business world as well.

The quality of the data set allowed the researchers to eliminate several kinds of statistical and research design-related challenges to any findings. The assumptions built into their empirical analysis are also quite conservative which increases our confidence that the effect is real.

And, the data are from the real world (not in the laboratory), demonstrating that the effect exists in business settings– in Denmark, anyway.

On the down side, the study offers us no actionable insight. There’s not much we can to to increase the number of daughters born to the female partners of male CEOs.

The Real Problem is the idea of CEO Daddy Feminism.

The real problem with the way this study has been ‘spun’. What’s been promoted is the idea that having a daughter leads a business man to be less sexist in his business decisions. Somehow, all we need to do is wait for powerful men to have daughters, and sexism at work will get fixed.

But that’s not true.

(Certainly some large portion of Fortune 500 (male) CEOs have daughters, but gender wage gaps exist in all of these firms. George Bush had a first-born daughter, and so did Rupert Murdoch. Has either man taken a leadership role for gender equity? No.)

This study is being sold to us so that we’ll believe in the idea of CEO Daddy “Feminism” — a special kind of paternalistic (dare I say, patriarchical) form of concern for women. Like the stealth discrimination promoted by so-called ‘benevolent sexism’, CEO Daddy Feminism discriminates more than it liberates.

CEO Daddy Feminism depends on him caring about “his” daughter — rather than asking him to care about everyone’s daughters.

CEO Daddy Feminism depends on him acting paternalistically towards someone beneath him — rather than asking him to address the discrimination that his wife, his sister, his mother, his colleagues, and his age peers have experienced and continue to experience.

CEO Daddy Feminism depends on him caring about someone he individually identifies with — rather than asking him to be empathic regarding all women.

CEO Daddy Feminism allows him to wait until he has little to lose — rather than asking him to examine his own privilege in the here and how.

CEO Daddy Feminism allows him to do only a little bit, for some gains in the long term, rather than to use his power to eliminate gender discrimination at work right now.

The problem of focusing on CEO Daddy Feminism as a possible solution is that it suggests that it’s okay only to act on your own child’s behalf, and only in small increments that never really effect the CEO himself.

This is not to dismiss the role that having a daughter or a son, or a wife or a sister, or a mother or a grandmother can play in bringing a man to become aware of sexism.

Don’t read this as a dismissal of the enlightenment, empathy, and action that can come from a man (or woman) finally realizing how sexism and other injustices are hurting people he loves.

And, don’t read this as a dismissal of the role that a feminist awakening can play in leading any man (or woman) with power to start to use that power to create equity.

Instead, see it as making a larger point –

A really enlightened CEO – Daddy or not — would institute policies and programs to eliminate gender wage gaps altogether.

See Also:  Imagine She’s Your 12 Year Old Daughter by Marion Chapsal
Images from Flickr:
Dad holds the girl 2008-06-03 008 from hansgrim Subway Dad & Daughter from Kevin H. You are my hero!!! from Fabiana Zonca

As much as I love academic writing, conducting studies and developing theories, all of this work shares one acute problem – it takes forever to get from first draft to print.

My just-published journal article with Adelaide King took about 8 years from idea to print, while the germinal paper on Organizational Identity & Identification with Jane Dutton and Janet Dukerich took a bit longer than 5 years.

When you’re working on ideas to contribute to ‘the literature’, that cycle time of 3, 4, or 8 years is awful, but still somehow bearable. In part, it’s bearable because in the interim you are sharing working paper versions with colleagues, influencing their thinking and developing your own. And, it is made bearable by knowing that not so much is changing (except the theory & knowledge itself) that makes you worry that the ideas are becoming obsolete.

Not so, though, with writing directed towards practitioners. The passage of time really matters. The time lag between idea and print is even worse when you are writing about a fast-moving phenomenon… like social media, for example. Practitioners could actually put to use the ideas that are shared in academic research, if only they have access to them (which they don’t until the ideas are in print).

This is all a big wind-up to say: Here’s a draft of a chapter I wrote 14 months ago, that won’t be published in hard copy until this spring. (That would be a total cycle time of 18-20 months– fast in the world of academics, but glacial for practitioners.) A better, more perfect version will appear in print, but in the meantime here are some ideas to enjoy– if they are not already obsolete!

Send me back your comments, suggestions, etc.

Re-creating Reputation Through Authentic Interaction: Using Social Media to Connect with Individual Stakeholders

Abstract

Organizations have a new opportunity for creating dialogues with individual stakeholders in which organizations can demonstrate their authenticity and earn a positive reputation. Social media tools, with their interactivity, constant stream of data, and easy sharing, make two-way symmetrical communication between individuals and organizations technically possible. And, strategies for making the organization socially present (i.e., more human) (Biocca, Harms, & Burgoon, 2003) online put the ultimate goal of authentic communication within reach of organizations.

To take advantage of these opportunities, organizations and reputation management practitioners will need to reconsider the roles of distinct, distributed interactions and individual stakeholders on creating reputation. Organization scholars will want to reconsider the relational approach to stakeholder management, and develop cross-disciplinary research to combine investigations of computer-mediated interaction with our evolving understanding of reputation management.

December 2009.
Forthcoming as a chapter in an edited book on Corporate Reputation, in Spring 2011.

ReCreating Reputation Harquail

(it does eventually download)

Here’s a mini-exam for you.

College ranking systems are:

A. A great way to sell magazines and get your publication’s name in the news
B. A scam that preys on the social and economic insecurities of educational organizations
C. A somewhat-helpful guide to prospective students
D. A process that is entirely gamed by the organizations that are being ranked
E. A problematic way to assess the meaningful distinctiveness of any institution
F. All of the above

If you chose F, go to the straight to the next question.

Everyone from Forbes to Business Week to US News & World Reports to The Economist to the Princeton Review has been ranking colleges, and graduate programs. Every year when these rankings come out we hear all about all the ways in which they are flawed.

When we step back and look at the whole picture, it makes me wonder whether the distinctions that these ranking make as they compare schools are very meaningful. Are these just a way to show various differences among schools? Or, are these authentic distinctions along meaningful criteria?

Do these rankings tell us anything meaningful about the organizations that are ranked?

Rankings vs. Meaningful Differences

These ranking systems tend to emphasize the financial assets of the institution, the academic potential of the student body, the school’s popularity among 17 and 18 year olds, and the perceived prestige and/or elitism of the institution. Every year they seem to add more and different measures, as though the sheer amount of data in the survey can make the distinctions among schools more meaningful.

Increasing the number of different measures makes the rankings more useful to some potential students (and their parents), to the degree that the rankings incorporate components that are important to the student. Some students do want to compare the the number of varsity sports teams from one school to another.

But in terms of telling us what those colleges are like, what defines them, what makes them significant, these long rows of numbers don’t tell us much at all.

As Jo Ellen Parker, President of Sweet Briar College, explains:

Rankings lists can produce strange conjunctions. On the Forbes.com list this year #87 is Sweet Briar, and #88 is Johns Hopkins University. While I have no doubt that Forbes’ methodology genuinely produced these results, it strikes me that these two excellent institutions are so different in nature and situation that their appearance side by side is almost startling. (emphasis mine)

Comparing Johns Hopkins and Sweet Briar overall is rather like comparing, well, a laptop and an autoclave. Both might be highly rated, but they’re far from interchangeable.

As Parker points out, these schools are ranked close together and rated as being pretty similar, when in fact they are not really alike at all.

Metrics about inputs (e.g., % applicants from USA) and metrics about component parts (e.g., university endowments) don’t necessarily convey information about an organization’s important qualities.  The schools’ average SAT scores and number of varsity sports teams does not help us understand either school’s core identity, what defines that school and its community, and what values that school holds dear.

Meaningful Differences: Identity and Core Values

In contrast to mainstream ranking strategies (e.g., those employed by Forbes, Business Week, US News & World Reports, etc.) and in contrast to the ethos behind these rankings is the approach taken by Washington Monthly. Washington Monthly focuses not on the prestige or elitism of the institution, but on how well these schools serve the public interest.

Washington Monthly ranks schools … “based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories:

• Social Mobility (recruiting and graduating low-income students),

• Research (producing cutting-edge scholarship and PhDs), and

• Service (encouraging students to give something back to their country).”

Why measure these outcomes?

By measuring these outcomes, Washington Monthly is sharing data about how committed these schools are to the values that underlie these outcomes. That, in turn, tells us something about the qualities of the school itself.

For example, knowing that Bryn Mawr College ranks 7th this year in the percentage of undergraduates who go on to get PhDs tells us more about the intellectual caliber of the experience at this college than its 49% acceptance rate (USNWR).

But even more important, Washington Monthly rankings measure what kinds of transformations these institutions are able to create for the students who join them and graduate from them.

Organizational Identity and Transformations

You can get terrific insights about an organization by looking at what happens with/to the people who join it.  Washington Monthly’s rankings tell us something about the organization’s positive approach to diversity, its orientation towards learning, and its orientation towards contributing to the world. These rankings give us a sense of what values inform the community, and what values will be emphasized by the members.

Of course, not every school values diversity, learning, and contributing to the world, not every school makes these values part of their core identity, and not every high school senior wants their college experience to emphasize these values.  But Washington Monthly’s survey offers meaningful information to these schools and students– by showing them (and others) which schools choose not to emphasize these values.

It’s always difficult to compare lots organizations simultaneously on criteria as idiosyncratic as their identities.  Each institution’s identity is unique, and so you’re always comparing apples to oranges and to strawberries. Still, there are some comparisons that are meaningful– comparisons based transformations (outputs) that reflect values, and metrics that demonstrate values.

All over the web I see stupid “surveys” collecting what is almost always meaningless data. The “results” of these “surveys” are then used to influence readers’ perceptions and to steer people towards (or away from) companies and services.

What I find frustrating, almost to the point of infuriating, is how most of these surveys violate the basic rules of  scientific social measurement.

Online Surveys Are Making Us Stupid

Why Online Surveys are (usually) Stupid

Most online surveys violate basic rules of social scientific measurement. Crimes against science include poorly defined terms, improperly worded questions (items), and careless question ordering that “lead the witness” and bias the respondents as they go through the ‘survey’.

But the biggest crime against science– the ‘fatal error’ — is improper sampling.

Improper sampling

A survey that hopes to have reputable, reliable, scientific results must be distributed to a random sample of the people you want to understand. The sample has to be randomized so that you can infer from the results of your survey what the patterns might be in the population at large.

Random sampling of the population is the number one requirement for social scientific survey. Even if every other criterion has been met, without random sampling, you can’t be said to have a scientific study.

But only 1 out of 7,281,989 online surveys or polls is administered to a randomized sample. That is, only about .0003% of online surveys are even remotely “scientific”.

Most online surveys ignore the importance of randomized sampling.

What happens, instead, is that the people who chance to come to your website (already a specific and biased portion of your population) see the survey and get the invitation to take it.

When presented with the survey online, only certain people are motivated to take it. And who are these people? The folks at either end of the spectrum–those people who are very positive or very negative about the phenomena.

People who complain are the most motivated to reply, people with praise are somewhat less often motivated to reply, and people who feel more ambivalent or more satisfied plain old satisfied are rarely motivated to apply.

So, the ‘results’ you have are from flamers and fans, not a representative sample. (And you wonder why 49% of people love your product, and 49% of people hate it?)

Sure, you get some ‘data’, but it is likely distorted and unrepresentative of what the bulk of your potential customers or people of interest actually believe.

Worse, still, is that many people mistakenly believe that they can get around the problem of improper sampling.

Recently, I challenged a website that advertised itself as a reliable resource for information comparing a dozen different service providers. Their supposedly objective consumer survey is completed by whomever comes to their site, clicks through to PollDaddy, and answers 10 questions.

I questioned whether they could accurately describe their survey as trustworthy and reliable given their lack of a randomized sampling procedure. Here’s the response I got from their ‘research director’:

Regarding our surveys, they are completed by customers from across the country and collected by an outside polling agency (PollDaddy) to ensure reliability/validity. In order for any survey to be reliable, you have to collect a large number of surveys. Anything over 100 is considered to be a very large sample size and data from such a large sample size is considered to be robust, reliable and scientific! We never use any data from any survey that does not have over 100 respondents.

If I were this company, I’d ask this research director exactly where he learned inferential statistics and survey design. But I digress…

The idea that response size compensates for biased or improper sampling just shows you how little users know about what it takes to have a scientific survey.

Stupid Surveys => Stupid Data => Bad Decisions

An even bigger problem is that people actually make important business decisions based on this bad ‘data’. The website in this example not only charges for a report of their survey results, but also they advise potential customers to choose one supplier over another based on their survey results.

I’m not sure I want to make a $20,000 purchase based on bad data. Would you?

Even scientific surveys can gather bad data.

Even well-designed, scientifically-rigorous online surveys are subject to validity and reliability challenges. Recent research on Internet surveys in formal psychological science has noted important shortcomings about how people take surveys online. These problems include completing the survey while drunk, reading the instructions improperly, clicking on items randomly, and skipping important questions altogether. But at least with a scientifically-rigorous survey design and delivery, you have a fighting chance to get good data.

Why We Like Stupid Surveys

Blogging experts and customer engagement advocates will argue that polls and surveys are important parts of a company’s online offerings.

– Polls increase reader engagement because they trigger some readers to reflect and then respond. And,

– Polls can be kind of fun– like an online game, you hit enter and get poll results, which feel satisfying even if they are informationally empty. (Try this here, and see what I mean. Wasn’t that fun?)

For bloggers, surveys can be useful in non-scientific ways… you can find out what some readers /respondents might think about a particular topic. Especially when there are open-ended questions in the ‘survey” –a place where people can just describe in their own words how they feel about something — you can get very interesting anecdotal insights about your product or service.

These insights might help you think differently about what you’re offering, which can be useful even though you don’t know what percentage of people feel this way or how important this feeling is to your overall market.

So, if (a.)  most online surveys are unscientific, and (b.) we like and (c.) use them anyway, then (d.) what are we left to do?

1. We can be really clear, to ourselves, about what these “results” actually are.

The results we get from unscientific surveys are feedback, not “data”.

2. We can be explicit in how we report them to others, making note that they are not scientific.

For example, survey information can be reported more accurately, as being about:

• “our readers who cared strongly enough to reply”
• “the readers who took time to take our survey”,
• readers who shared their opinion”, and so forth.

3. We can invent and use a more accurate label for these tools.

We need a label we can use every time we talk about the tools and what they gather, but a label that is catchier and shorter than

“a marginally useful collection of meaning-diminished numbers that let us talk about a phenomenon as though we know something about it when we don’t.”

Alternatively,

4. We can keep online survey tools out of the hands of amateurs.

We could allow only those with training in survey design, statistics, and data analysis to use survey tools.

It’s important to note that the misuse of online surveys is not exactly the fault of the online survey companies themselves. A few online survey companies and online marketing research firms go to great lengths to offer information to potential users (like tutorials on statistical sampling) to help improve the validity of the surveys that their users will design.  But more often than not, the websites advertising these  easy to (mis)use tools are absolutely unhelpful if you want to design a survey that’s anything more than neatly formatted.

It’s one thing to poll the readers of your site to ask them if they want more book reviews or discussions of different topics. It’s another thing to claim that you provide ‘consumer ratings and preferences’ or can offer advice others on how they should run their businesses, when these ratings and advice are derived from stupid, unscientific online surveys.

Unscientific surveys are dumbing us down. They are dumbing us down about the things we’re trying to understand with the surveys, and they are dumbing us down about scientific measurement itself.

I have decided that this Cognitive Bias Video Song video is a YouTube sensation, despite its having only 1,046 hits as of this writing and the subsequent (and temporary) absence of social affirmation of its sensation-ism.

This song about Cognitive Bias was made salient to me by Mediation Channel, an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) blog written by Diane Levin. Since I write so often about specific forms of bias like discrimination, and since inauthenticity is its own special kind of cognitive dissonance, I thought that some of you might enjoy this song.

While it’s true that mediation has nothing to do with my areas of professional expertise, and that some would think I should be reading other things, to that I say: “Whatever. I don’t need to justify my decision. I know that my judgment is supported — even enhanced– by a host of cognitive biases.”

I think that this video is a sensation, and you should agree with me (or not).
Why? Refer back to those biases.

You could try to guess which cognitive bias(es) lead me to think that this song is a sensation….Is it:

– The recency effect?
– The choice supportive bias?
– Déformation professionnelle (a bias that is (1) professionally relevant, (2) a pun!, and (3) the title of an obscure German glitch-electronica ‘song’)?
– The well-traveled road effect?
– Plain vanilla self-affirmation bias?

Or, my personal fave, the all-purpose Fundamental Attribution Error?

Listen to the song, remember your Psych 101 lectures, and then decide. In an unbiased way, of course.

.

This video, a study aid for students preparing for their AP Psychology exam, was created by and features Arundel (Maryland) High School teacher Bradley Wray.

Diane Levin found this video through her colleagues at the Bias and Belief blog, which is now another blog I’ll be reading. (How can you not love a blog that has “Crackpotology” as one of its categories? Pleeze.)

I’ll just have to justify these blogs as being relevant to my work.

Hmm, which biases might I use to do that?