A Great IDEA!

Synthetic Validity: A Great Idea Whose Time Never Came

Synthetic validity is very much like monogamy. It is an idea that is universally admired but not widely practiced. The concept of synthetic validity has been around for almost 60 years (Lawshe, 1952) and it is described in virtually every testing and measurement book and every industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology textbook I have ever read. I still vividly remember my undergraduate Psy...

The idea of race in science: Great Britain, 1800–1960

What he finds is that certain immunities and physical features protected bondsmen (tolerance to humid heat, malaria, yellow fever) while others hurt them (pigmentation filtered out much sunlight and thus vitamin D, inexperience with turberculosis and pneumonia and other European diseases significantly increased mortality rates). Add to that a diet probably high enough in calories but frequently...

Commentary: health & behavior codes: great idea, questionable outcome.

Operating a successful pediatric psychology service in a hospital setting requires attention to three primary domains of professional practice: the clinical, operational, and financial (Kessler, 2008). Even an optimally provided service in the clinical and operational domains is unlikely to be sustainable if not also financially viable. One major challenge to financial viability is that overhea...

Pay for performance: great idea. But can it deliver great results?

No Idea Is a Bad Idea: A Theoretical Explanation

Many business publications state that no idea is a bad idea, that even if the idea is, at first glance, not helpful, there are usually some aspects of this idea which are helpful Usually, this statement is based on the experience of the author, and it is given without any theoretical explanation. In this paper, we provide a theoretical explanation for this statement. 1 No Idea Is a Bad Idea Man...