Scott Highhouse

Bowling Green State University | BGSU · Department of Psychology

Some assert that noise (i.e., unwanted variance) is the most neglected yet most important source of error in judgment. We suggest that this problem was discovered nearly 100 years ago in the area of personnel selection and that a century of selection research has shown that noise can be demonstrably reduced by structuring the process (i.e., decompo...

convenience samples

Meta-analysis of 6,644 correlations from 133 independent samples (N = 69,125) was conducted to examine whether risk propensity is subsumed by or independent of the traits comprising the five-factor model (FFM) of personality, and whether risk propensity has predictive utility above and beyond the FFM. Analyses revealed weak to modest relations betw...

Risk aversion is a universal characteristic of humans. This is demonstrated by simple experiments showing, for example, that people will overwhelmingly choose a sure $3000 over an 80% chance of $4000. This is despite the fact that the expected value of the risky option is $3200—demonstrating that people will pay to avoid risk. The Swiss mathematici...

To what extent do countries and people within countries vary in their perceptions about the risks and benefits of engaging in risky activities? And to what extent are these variations influenced by risk domains? We used generalizability theory to identify and quantify the variance components in perceived risk and benefit ratings that are attributab...

Validity information (effect sizes) for selection tests can be difficult for people to understand without some additional context. This study examined how manipulation of the immediate context influenced impressions of the validity of a sales ability selection test. We found that lay people (n = 350) were more favorable toward the test when a set o...

Industrial-Organizational (IO) psychology academics and practitioners (N = 145) from around the world were asked to nominate what they believed to be, in the last five years, the most important published article for research and/or practice. The article provides a framework for crowdsourcing important advances in the field, and can be directed towa...

A preregistered replication was conducted to examine the evidence for the basic dilution effect in a performance prediction context. Participants (n = 796) were presented with either diagnostic information alone or diagnostic + nondiagnostic information in a grade point average (GPA) prediction task. The diagnostic information was either indicative...

A two-wave study with a sample of employed adults ( n = 219) examined the interaction of proactive personality and perceived autonomy in the prediction of self-reported job crafting. We found that proactive personality was associated with increased job crafting, and this relation was stronger among people who reported experiencing a higher level of...

Personality and intelligence are two commonly measured constructs used for employee selection that have been shown to be valid predictors of job performance. Often used in connection with other measures, the combination of personality and intelligence assessments has been shown to have incremental validity over either type of assessment used alone....

Personality and intelligence are two commonly measured constructs used for employee selection that have been shown to be valid predictors of job performance. Often used in connection with other measures, the combination of personality and intelligence assessments has been shown to have incremental validity over either type of assessment used alone....

Prestigious journals are widely admired for publishing quality scholarship, yet the primary indicators of journal prestige (i.e., impact factors) do not directly assess audience admiration. Moreover, the publication landscape has changed substantially in the last 20 years, with electronic publishing changing the way we consume scientific research....

The present study investigated a potential antecedent of workplace mistreatment, sadism, which represents the dispositional tendency to engage in cruel, demeaning, or harmful behavior for dominance or pleasure. Time-lagged data from 379 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers showed that sadism positively predicted interpersonal deviance, instigated incivil...

interviewing; assessment centers; college admissions; hiring

Brainteaser interview questions such as “Estimate how many windows are in New York” are just one example of aggressive interviewer behaviour that lacks evidence for validity and is unsettling to job applicants. This research attempts to shed light on the motives behind such behaviour by examining the relation between dark‐side traits and the percei...

The cross-fertilization of JDM and I-O has increased since the earlier version of this chapter, but there remains considerable opportunity for the areas to contribute to one another. Like the previous chapter, this chapter was written with the objective of presenting an accessible treatment of modern judgment and decision making research, and stimu...

Aguinis et al. (2017) contribute interesting analyses of cited sources in contemporary undergraduate industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology textbooks and continue their ongoing investigation into the long-term viability of I-O psychology as a unique discipline (see Aguinis, Bradley, & Brodersen, 2014). These analyses, conducted by authors who a...

Job-hopping is the practice of making frequent voluntary job changes. Integrating theory and research from career and organizational turnover research, two distinct motives for job-hopping were proposed. The escape motive describes frequently changing jobs to escape disliked work environments, whereas the advancement motive describes frequently cha...

It is suggested that work importance research has suffered from construct proliferation, and that the literature would benefit from returning to Dubin’s (1956) original notion of work importance as a general construct – representing the degree to which work plays a central role in one’s life space. Measures of three work importance constructs (i.e....

Three studies examine the relation of dispositional status-seeking with workplace self-presentation behaviors. The first study showed that the status-seeking motive provided incremental prediction, over and above narcissism and self-monitoring, in self-reported exaggerating, faking, and fabricating in job search. The second study showed that, after...

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Frederick, 2005) is a three-item performance-based measure designed to assess one's tendency to over-ride automatic responses in favor of further reflection. Although the test has been widely cited, and predicts varied outcomes, little is known about the sex differences observed in the initial report. This study...

Although modesty and supplication are both self-effacing impression management behaviors for underplaying one’s strengths, they are likely to result in different supervisory perceptions. In an examination of the effects of modesty and supplication in the same working sample, the results from a Chinese sample of supervisor–subordinate dyads (n = 88)...

The Domain-specific Risk-taking scale was designed to assess risk taking in specific domains. This approach is unconventional in personality assessment but reflects conventional wisdom in the decision community that cross-situational consistency in risk taking is more myth than reality. We applied bifactor analysis to a large sample (n=921) of resp...

This second edition provides managers and students the nuts and bolts of assessment processes and selection techniques. With this knowledge, managers learn to make informed personnel decisions based on the results of tests and assessments. The book emphasizes that employee performance predictions require well-formed hypotheses about personal charac...

Over 50 years of research on cognitive style has converged on the importance of individual differences in use of intuition and analysis. This program of research is characterized, however, by two incompatible perspectives about the relation between intuition and analysis. The distinction concerns whether intuition and analysis are opposite poles of...

Despite the importance of corporate reputation, little is known about how it develops. The main purpose of the current study was to begin to understand the formation of corporate reputation by investigating the antecedents of general evaluations of corporations. Specifically, we tested the viability of a corporate impression formation model that wa...

A representative sample of (n = 439) adults in the United States responded to questions about the usefulness of tests of cognitive ability and conscientiousness, along with questions about their beliefs in free will and (scientific) determinism. As hypothesized, belief in scientific determinism predicted perceived usefulness of a cognitive ability...

Landers and Behrend (2015) present yet another attempt to limit reviewer and editor reliance on surface characteristics when evaluating the generalizability of study results (see also Campbell, 1986; Dipboye & Flanagan, 1979; Greenberg, 1987; Highhouse, 2009; Highhouse & Gillespie, 2009). Most of the earlier treatments of sample generalizability, h...

Research has demonstrated the usefulness of decision styles for predicting various performance-related criteria. It is still unclear, however, which particular styles are associated with a general tendency to make high-quality decisions. Participants (n = 168) completed a common measure of five decision styles, along with a measure of the traits in...

A firm’s reputation is intimately tied to the reputation of its CEO. Extreme executive compensation packages, therefore, pose a perception problem for corporations. Two experiments with working adults used a simulated newspaper story as a platform to examine the impact of contextual and dispositional factors on naïve recipient outrage over an extre...

Two experiments used a hypothetical hiring scenario to examine (a) how standardizing employee selection practices affects decision makers’ perceptions of autonomy potential, and (b) if increasing the level of autonomy inherent in standardized practices reduces decision makers’ reluctance to use them. The results of Experiment 1 suggest that decisio...

Presents an obituary for Robert M. Guion (1924-2012). Bob received his bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa in 1948 and his master's degree (1950) and doctorate (1952) from Purdue University, the latter in I-O psychology. His doctoral mentor, about whom he always spoke with gratitude, was C. H. Lawshe. Although Bob found employment opportu...

The major premise of this article is that increased exposure to-and increased application of-theories, methods, and findings from the judgment and decision-making (JDM) field will aid industrial-organizational psychology and organizational behavior (IOOB) researchers and practitioners in studying workplace decisions. To this end, we first provide e...

Purpose Many human resource professionals erroneously believe that they can hire the best employees without the assistance of decision aids. The purpose of this study is to examine personal and situational characteristics that may relate to preference for intuition‐based approaches to hiring employees. Design/methodology/approach A representative...

Understanding why decision makers resist using standardized approaches to employee selection requires understanding basic feelings and beliefs about different approaches for collecting and combining assessment information. This study examines lay perceptions of selection decision aids, using a sample of 418 working adults. Holding constant the attr...

Considerable research has supported the similarity–attraction effect, wherein similarity on various dimensions predicts interpersonal attraction. The present study extended this notion to workplace attraction, by examining whether applicant similarity to prospective co-workers enhances attraction to the potential employer. Similarity between colleg...

Although considerable research attention has been directed at understanding perceptions of salary fairness, very little attention has been given to how salary expectations are formed or how trivial elements of the job search context may influence these expectations. Two experiments demonstrated how the simple manipulation of response options for a...

We are gratified by the large number of commentaries to our focal article (Dalal, Bonaccio, et al., 2010) that advocated greater integration of industrial-organizational psychology and organizational behavior (IOOB) with the field of judgment and decision making (JDM). The commentaries were uniformly constructive and civil. Our disagreements with t...

Although many social scientists and political commentators have speculated that the American work ethic is in decline, the last longitudinal study of this issue was conducted by Vecchio (1980) on data collected over 30 years ago. Vecchio examined whether workers would wish to continue working even if it were not financially necessary (i.e., the so-...

Organizational research on trust and distrust has focused mainly on interpersonal relationships within organizations or impressions people have about specific companies. Less is known about people's attitudes toward all corporations (ie, as institutions). This article describes a theory of distrust toward corporations, how this attitude forms and h...

Researchers have only recently turned their attention to the study of corporate reputation.As is characteristic of many early areas of management inquiry, the field is decidedly multidisciplinary and disconnected. This article selectively reviews reputation research conducted mainly during the past decade. A framework is proposed that views reputat...

Organizational research has relied too heavily on methods characterized by passive observation, likely because there is a widespread belief that experimental research has limited generalizability. However, this is often because researchers (and reviewers or editors) misunderstand the nature of generalizability and what it requires. This article rei...

The researchers used generalizability theory to examine whether reputation judgments about corporations function in a manner consistent with contemporary theory in the corporate-reputation literature. University professors (n = 86) of finance, marketing, and human resources management made repeated judgments about the general reputations of highly...

Purpose – In industrial‐organizational psychology, research and practice has focused on the use of situational judgment tests to predict managerial job performance. Although there is considerable controversy over what these tests actually measure, many have argued that they at least partially measure practical intelligence or “common sense.” Theref...

The focus of this article is on implicit beliefs that inhibit adoption of selection decision aids (e.g., paper-and-pencil tests, structured interviews, mechanical combination of predictors). Understanding these beliefs is just as important as understanding organizational constraints to the adoption of selection technologies and may be more useful f...

In 1985, the U.S. Army commissioned prominent psychologists to investigate the possibility of extending human capabilities using parapsychological techniques (Swets & Bjork, 1990). Influential members of the army were frustrated by the slow pace of advancements in human performance and believed that large gains could be made using methods outside o...

Recent research suggesting that people who maximize are less happy than those who satisfice has received considerable fanfare. The current study investigates whether this conclusion reflects the construct itself or rather how it is measured. We developed an alternative measure of maximizing tendency that is theory-based, has good psychometric prope...

This article examines the self-presentation goals that underlie attraction to organizations. Expanding on Lievens and Highhouse’s (2003) instrumental vs. symbolic classification of corporate attributes, a theory of symbolic attraction is presented that posits social-identity consciousness as a moderator of the relation between symbolic inferences a...

Student members of a national organization of African American engineers (n= 1019) and currently employed African American engineers (n= 303) responded to a hypothetical job advertisement differing by staffing policy (identity-blind vs. identity-conscious), advertised work characteristics (i.e., individual-based vs. team-based), and compensation sy...

Although individual assessment is a thriving area of professional practice in industry, it receives little, if any, attention from textbooks on industrial psychology or personnel management. This article is an attempt to establish individual assessment's place in the history of personnel selection, and to examine why the practice has survived despi...

One goal of most corporate marketing strategies is to make stakeholders more familiar with the corporation. The implicit assumption behind these strategies is that familiarity leads to positive outcomes - particularly in the context of firm reputation. Although evidence for a positive effect of familiarity on reputation is inconclusive at best, the...

Participants in Study 1 (N= 172) were presented with a restaurant server advertisement differing by vacancy availability (scarce vs. plentiful) and scarcity type (number of vacancies vs. time to apply). Companies advertising only a few vacancies available were perceived as paying a significantly higher hourly wage than companies advertising many va...

The present study was concerned with investigating the nature of assessment center exercises. Bem and Funder's (1978) technique of classifying and comparing situations in behavioral terms was applied to the measurement of exercises in an assessment center with ratings reflecting exercise factors. Six assessors created templates for each of the four...

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of goal framing in job advertisements on organizational attractiveness. Job ads were created that emphasized the potential costs or losses of not applying (i.e., loss frame) or the potential gains or benefits of applying (i.e., gain frame). The first experiment (N= 70) found that participant...

Recently there has been a great deal of interest among consumer and behavioral judgment researchers on how immediate affective reactions influence overall evaluations. The current study seeks to determine whether immediate affective reactions to organizational attributes warrant the attention of recruitment researchers as well. Using a customized w...

Past research on the importance of traits and abilities in supervisors' hirability decisions has ignored the influence of the selection method used to derive information about these traits and abilities. In this study, experienced retail store supervisors (N = 163) rated job applicant profiles that were described on the Big Five and General Mental...

This study examined whether how one goes about searching for and choosing a job relates to later job satisfaction. Contrary to Wilson and Schooler's [J. Personality Soc. Psychol. 60 (1991) 181] disruption hypothesis, the results suggested that people who engaged in a careful and deliberate search and choice process were more satisfied than people w...

The authors conducted 4 studies to construct a multidimensional measure of perceptions of organization personality. Results of the first 2 studies suggest that (a) 5 broad factors are sufficient to capture the structure of organization personality perceptions, (b) real-world organizations differ on personality profiles, and (c) personality trait in...

The approach taken in the present investigation was to examine reactions to positive and negative employer information by eliciting online (i.e., moment-to-moment) reactions in a simulated computer-based job fair. Reactions to positive and negative information commonly reveal a negatively biased asymmetry. Positively biased asymmetries have been do...

Organizational attraction measures are commonly used as surrogate assessments of organizational pursuit. Despite the range in content often encompassed by such instruments, no research has systematically examined the assumptions underlying their use. The authors address this issue by empirically distinguishing items assessing attractiveness, presti...

This research questioned the proposition that corporate familiarity is positively associated with firm reputation. Student images of familiar and unfamiliar Fortune 500 corporations were examined in 4 experiments. The results suggested that, consistent with behavioral decision theory and attitude theory, highly familiar corporations provide informa...

This study adds a new marketing-based angle to the study of the attractiveness of organizations in the early stages of the recruitment process. Drawing on the instrumental-symbolic framework from the marketing literature, we expected that the meanings (in terms of inferred traits) that prospective applicants associate with employing organizations w...

Research in decision making has suggested that the degree to which features of an option are shared versus unique influences preferences in a way that violates normative rules. The generalizability of these findings to job choice was investigated. Senior-level, undergraduate job seekers (N = 216) were presented with three jobs from which they were...

The growth of the field of group dynamics was synonymous with the rise of the T-group in leadership education. This article documents the tumultuous history of the T-group movement in the United States, particularly as it has been applied in management development. Although the T-group is commonly dismissed as a management fad, the author suggests...

Two experiments were conducted to examine the persuasive impact of different types of evidence supporting an organizational recruitment message. In the first experiment, information on organizational values, presented in a recruitment brochure, was supported using statistical, anecdotal, or no evidence. Graduating university students who were atten...

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of a strategic issue's temporal proximity on the identification of the issue as threatening or opportunity like. In Experiment 1, university students (N = 86) reacted to hypothetical threats or opportunities that differed in the degree to which they were immediate or delayed. Evidence was fo...

Highhouse, S., & Hoffman, J.R. (2001). Organizational attraction and job choice. In C.L. Cooper & I.T. Robertson (eds.), International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (Vol. 16, pp. 37-64). Wiley.

Judgment and decision making is a highly interdisciplinary field that has flourished in recent years. This chapter was written with the objective of presenting an accessible treatment of modern judgment and decision making research, and stimulating ideas for decision research and application in the workplace. Special attention is given to topics th...

Recent research has shown that decision makers are less likely to accept an opportunity after failing to act on a previous offer, an effect labeled inaction inertia. We extended the original research by examining the phenomenon in the domain of losses as well as in the domain of gains. A pattern consistent with the inaction inertia effect was found...

Although personnel counseling was once considered to be at the cutting edge of psychology applied to the workplace, the practice has been virtually ignored in historical treatments of the field. This article tells the story of the rise and fall of personnel counseling in organizations. The contributions of Elton Mayo and the Hawthorne research team...

A decoy effect occurs when the addition of an inferior choice alternative changes the preference relations among the other alternatives in the set. Whereas many authors have suggested that the decoy effect has considerable relevance to applied decision-making contexts, others have suggested that the phenomenon may not be found in situations more re...

Historically, there has been little guidance from the recruitment literature on how organizations can assess the image that potential applicants hold of their company as a place to work. We demonstrate the application of a technique for identifying employment image dimensions that are most critical in distinguishing among companies in the same indu...

A common assertion in the job choice literature is that a job attribute (e.g., starting salary) will influence choice more when it has a wide range of values than when it has a narrow range of values. The authors suggest that this conclusion tells only part of the story concerning how attribute range influences job choice, and they show how the sta...

Findings in multiattribute decision research were used as a basis for predicting the effects of help-wanted advertisement characteristics on vacancy attractiveness. In the first experiment, undergraduate students were presented with entry-level service job advertisements differing in attribute set size, attribute relevance, and pay ambiguity. Resul...

Procedural influences on peer-rater distortion and delay were investigated in a field experiment. Employees (N=123) of a business information firm were randomly assigned to conditions in a 2 (upward accountability versus no accountability) by 2 (administrative purpose versus research purpose) experimental design. Results revealed evidence for an ac...

Item response theory (IRT) methodology allowed an in-depth examination of several issues that would be difficult to explore using traditional methodology. IRT models were estimated for 4 risky-choice items, answered by students under either a gain or loss frame. Results supported the typical framing finding of risk-aversion for gains and risk-seeki...

This article highlights the relevance of behavioral decision research to the task of choosing one job candidate from a small set of comparable finalists (e.g., executive placement, presidential election). A conceptual framework is presented which views job-finalist choice as a quasi-rational process, composed of both analytical and intuitive sub-pr...

Although considerable research attention has been given to the topic of performance rating inflation, comparatively less attention has been paid to the issue of performancefeedbackinflation. In two laboratory experiments, poorly-performing confederates were evaluated and given feedback using either a direct (face-to-face) or indirect (tape-recorded...