Whitepapers

Recent social and political trends in the United States have not been kind to assessments. For instance, the number of colleges requiring standardized test scores for admission continues to drop. As another example, assessments can be collateral damage in the bipartisan movement to re-examine occupational licensing. And a growing movement also looks to malign the use of assessments in the…

If you’ve ever led creative people, you know that managing creative teams takes special techniques. Creativity and imagination can bring innovation as well as impracticality. Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp discussed what works and what doesn’t when managing creative teams. Research has shown best practices for…

Beyond the common awkwardness of performance review conversations, Gallup has found that work performance actually gets worse after the review for one-third of employees. So why do annual performance reviews tend to be so unsuccessful? As Gallup’s writers observe, part of the issue might be that performance review conversations tend to be tied to conversations about promotions and pay…

Is patience a virtue? Well . . . according to a new theory, there’s a much more fruitful way to think about the psychology of patience. Recently on The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, and Blake Loepp spoke with Kate Sweeny, PhD, professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside, about the psychology of patience. A social psychologist…

Academic psychology maintains that personality should be described in terms of five dimensions—the so-called five-factor model—and that all other dimensions of personality are combinations of these. But this model isn’t as comprehensive as many tend to believe. Consider ambition, for example. Ambition isn’t a factor in the Big Five, but we know it’s an important dimension…