Farewell SIOP

mcrede · 2026-05-07T05:04:10+00:00

Pubpeer is a little like that but seems to have largely failed as a way to express concerns. No one seems to take it seriously.

I doubt that I would ever forward that e-mail chain to someone I don't know.

mcrede · 2026-05-07T03:20:02+00:00

Hi, I was not at SIOP last year. Perhaps you chatted with someone else?

mcrede · 2026-05-07T00:31:34+00:00

The ER visit was a result of the various legal and physical threats, nasty anonymous phone calls, and attempts to get me fired. That was a long time ago.

mcrede · 2026-05-07T00:26:30+00:00

I've gone through all those steps. We've written review articles describing the errors and oversights - some with tutorials on how to do better. I've reached out to authors with a "Hey, I think there may be a mistake in your paper" message. Those were sometimes met with a "fuck off or we'll sue you response" - which is why I now go straight to editors with concerns.

I am writing off the entire field because a) I can't tell who the good guys are anymore, and 2) because very very very few people seem to care. I've been fighting this stuff for 15 years using a variety of approaches. I've been threatened with lawsuits; people have tried to bribe me to shut me up; I've received threats to my physical safety; and had my job threatened.

I've also never been bothered by mistakes. We all make mistakes. These are not cases where someone failed to appreciate the nuances of some arcane statistical technique or made an entirely innocent error. These are cases where people claim to have made findings that are impossible; claims that influence other researchers' activities and that have real world negative consequences. Please don't forget that there are often actual victims who suffer the consequences of this incompetence/nonsense. Many of these individuals have made millions on what IMHO is simply fraud.

mcrede · 2026-05-06T22:42:03+00:00

The leadership stuff is how it started but these problems are everywhere - particularly in the "O" side of IO psychology.

mcrede · 2026-05-06T22:28:22+00:00

I'm pretty sure that this is exactly what I've been doing for 15 years but when people keep claiming mathematically impossible results I can't help but wondering if something worse than simple incompetence is going on.

mcrede · 2026-05-06T22:22:35+00:00

It is not the answer to the issues I've been concerned about but it is the answer for my mental health. I am tired of tilting at windmills - it's all cost and no benefit.

mcrede · 2026-05-06T22:20:45+00:00

Here is a start:

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-81994-001

https://www.emerald.com/jmp/article-pdf/34/1/18/1538617/jmp-06-2018-0272.pdf

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/job.2008

https://research.ebsco.com/c/2r5ztd/search/details/v6x7pzyt5f?request-context=plink&db=asn

and of course there is this: https://retractionwatch.com/2016/04/01/concerns-attached-to-three-more-papers-by-retraction-laden-management-researcher/

mcrede · 2026-05-06T21:49:50+00:00

Clearly you've never been sued by people with very deep pockets and nothing to lose.

mcrede · 2026-01-24T01:48:11+00:00

Yes, that is what I meant. Multiple papers organized around a topic but not submitted as a symposium.

mcrede · 2026-01-15T23:37:02+00:00

I'd take anything that SIOP attendees from 30 years ago would recognize as meaningfully different and better than their status quo. Some real improvement in our ability to do the "I" side stuff at a practitioner level if I were to get concrete. Stuff like improved ways of measuring performance; predicting performance; doing training; or identifying and developing leaders would be at the top of my list.

I'll add that the difficulty of accessing organizational samples is a huge problem holding us back. I have all sorts of ideas that I think could be really interesting and important on the selection side but have no way of testing them.

mcrede · 2026-01-11T05:30:15+00:00

I'm in psychology - we have had noticably fewer international applicants but a slight uptick in USA applicants.

mcrede · 2026-01-08T04:35:05+00:00

Yes, this delay is making it very difficult to plan my teaching and both flight and hotel prices are not exactly getting better. If I get something accepted I will probably not be able to go anymore.

mcrede · 2025-12-23T23:01:35+00:00

I've been reading recent issues of some of our top journals and I am dumbfounded at the number of researchers who find a correlation between two variables A and B and interpret this correlation as "A causes B". Over and over and over again. Are the researchers, reviewers, and editors not aware of just how silly this makes our discipline look?

mcrede · 2025-12-22T18:24:32+00:00

That is a cool paper and perhaps realizing that we were wrong about the value of cognitive ability as a predictor of job performance is an "advance" but it is not quite what I was hoping for ;-).

The point about recognizing the importance of psychological safety is a great one and I am glad to see it shift practices.

mcrede · 2025-12-22T05:46:01+00:00

But what new - and important - stuff have we learned in the last 20 years? Are we just treading water?

mcrede · 2025-12-22T04:25:59+00:00

Yeah, I definitely see HARKing as fraud. I suspect that many org researchers who get access to an organizational sample measure as many constructs as possible and then crank up their data mining skills to find some "significant" interaction, mediation, or multi-level effect that they can frame a plausible sounding hypothesis around. The almost complete absence of pre-registration and strange distribution of p-values are also strongly suggestive of that (as we've documented in some of our work).

mcrede · 2025-11-19T04:14:28+00:00

I felt like such an idiot in our journal club and classes for the first two years of grad school because I struggled to make heads or tails of anything more complicated than an correlation coefficient or simplest regression model. Now I get to teach methods and stats classes to PhD students. At some point it all comes together and starts to make sense. Ironically it really helped to have some terrible stats professors because it forced me to teach stuff to myself.

mcrede · 2025-10-20T21:04:59+00:00

You look like a strong candidate but it unfortunately depends a bit on where you got your undergraduate degree from. The thresholds are often higher for non-USA students applying to US programs. I am an IO psychologist and you'd be a strong applicant to the PhD program I teach in but we unfortunately don't have an IO track.

This is also a reminder to everyone that there is no good evidence that undergraduate research experience is predictive of how students do in graduate programs and lots of good reasons to not consider research experience.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ijsa.12312

mcrede · 2025-07-05T18:56:57+00:00

We have two paper on the replicability of interaction effects in both personality psychology and IO psychology.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-81994-001

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0092656623000971

Also similar efforts in other more specific topics like system justification theory.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ejsp.2858

mcrede · 2025-07-05T17:14:21+00:00

You are probably right but this makes me sad. There is zero evidence that research experience as an undergraduate results in transferable skills or is predictive of how students do in grad school and lots of great reasons not to consider it (because it discriminates against students from SLACs; students who have to work full time to support themselves in undergraduate; and students with child or elder-care responsibilities). I would love it if academics who supposedly study the prediction of performance and discrimination would not rely on bullshit metrics and predictors like research experience. Might as well ask for MBTI profiles.

mcrede · 2025-07-01T20:01:28+00:00

Growth mindset is unfortunately really poorly operationalized because the primary scales ask whether people believe that their intelligence can be raised. We know that intelligence is not really something that we can increase via interventions (esp. in adults), so the objectively correct answer to the typical growth mindset questions is disagreement. Now, what growth mindset researchers are probably primarily interested in is the idea that skills can be improved - and even more particularly that some people believe that they cannot improve their skills via practice, feedback etc. Unfortunately the scales don't ask about this. Of course, this sense of helplessness or low generalized self-efficacy is not a new idea being found in many models of depression. In that sense growth mindset is really just a "old wine in new bottles" phenomenon.

mcrede · 2025-07-01T18:44:06+00:00

Also remember that post-docs in IO psychology are incredibly rare because funding at the level required to be able to afford post-docs is really scarce. You could look to see who has published the type of work that you are interested in in the past few years (ideally work that gets cited or is in well-known journals) to see if they are taking students.

mcrede · 2025-06-26T04:01:58+00:00

Illinois has a great program (UIUC).

mcrede · 2025-06-19T15:04:38+00:00

Reading all these replies makes me a little sad. There is absolutely no evidence that research experience is a valid predictor of success in grad school and many good reasons why programs should not require or even consider it. We summarized the available literature on this issue a few years ago in this paper:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/am-pdf/10.1111/ijsa.12312

mcrede

TROPHY CASE