We continue our exploration of the field of Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology, the American Psychological Association’s Division 14. If you’ve read our recent blogs, you already know that I-O Psychology is the study of behavior in the workplace. I-O Psychologists frequently help businesses better hire, motivate, and retain employees, but they can apply their skills in many other ways.
This interview series is all about I-O Psychologists’ passion projects and showcases how I-O professionals are applying their training to try to make a difference in the world. If you missed the first two blogs of this series, you can read the interviews with Drs. Haley Woznyj: I-O Psychologists’ Passion Projects: Animal Rescue and Ann Marie Ryan: I-O Psychologists’ Passion Projects: Increasing Fairness For Job Seekers With Criminal Records.
Meet Mike Morrison, a doctoral student in Michigan State University’s Organizational Psychology program. Doctoral students routinely attend the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology’s (SIOP‘s) Annual Conference, where they present their research to other I-O graduate students, academics, and practitioners, and strive to ultimately publish articles describing their research in I-O journals.
Typical conference poster sessions feature several lines of poster boards. Presenters stand next to their posters, ready to summarize their work and answer any questions, while other attendees walk around hoping to learn something. Unfortunately, the wall of small text that is the typical science poster makes it difficult for presenters to communicate their findings and for passersby to learn what they really want to know within the allotted time. Mike recognized the problem and proposed a solution in a video that has since gone viral. His new poster design puts the research finding front and center, in laymen’s terms and in large text that’s easy for passersby to process. If they want to learn more, they can approach, read the sidebars, and ask the presenter questions.
Mike has ideas for improving what he views as an arcane academic journal system that makes it very difficult for scientists, including I-O Psychologists, to share their research and glean current best practices in a given area. He delivered his pitch at SIOP’s 2018 Annual Conference in Chicago, IL. You can watch it here.
Below, Mike answers our questions about his work on better science communication and where he hopes to see it go from here. He offers some advice on how you, too, can find your passion.
Juliya: How did you first become interested in improving science communication? What about this topic caught your interest?
Mike: I was a website designer/developer for 10 years before starting my PhD. On the internet, if you fail to sustain people’s attention, such as by overloading them with irrelevant detail, they’ll click the back button and find some other website. I think we scientists would like to pretend this doesn’t apply to us, but people are people. We’re all busy and ruthless with how we allocate our attention. Everybody skims. Everybody wants the “need to know” information first. Everybody is impacted more by images than by text.
When I started my PhD, I was horrified to see the ancient, user-frustrating interfaces that scientific knowledge flows through. Click To Tweet For years, it was my job to measure how a more clearly designed web page can increase sales and customer interest, and how ruinous a badly designed one can be. In science, it’s not missed sales but missed cures for diseases on the line. And science has the most tragically and disastrously bad interfaces I’ve ever seen, with prolonged human suffering as a consequence.
Juliya: Your presentations seem very engaging for both technical and lay audiences. Can you tell me a little about your process of translating your ideas for an audience?
Mike: I’m glad you think so! Spending 10 years writing for internet audiences definitely helped. I think the thing that I do differently than most academics I’ve seen is that I obsess over the cognitive load and emotional impact of what I’m presenting. My goal isn’t to impress people with complex ideas to prove my competence; my goal is to keep their attention and make them feel something while showing them a new way to look at an idea. I want it to be fun, and I want them to remember it forever. This is very hard to do, but I like to make the attempt anyway.
Overloading people with information is the quickest way to make them lose interest and space out. I try to keep my slides extremely simple and use animation to have one thing at a time show up on the screen.
The emphasis on getting an emotional response is normal in design because designers know that emotion facilitates memory and attention. I think scientists might view this as foreign and repulsive in the context of their presentations, but they shouldn’t.
Juliya: Have you had opportunities to collaborate with others on the topic of science communication?
Mike: Yes! The greatest science communication experience of my life was attending CommSciCon in Atlanta. It’s a small, inexpensive, workshop-style conference, and provided so much insight. You’re surrounded by people from every field who reward you for talking about your work in a compelling way (such as when you use humor to communicate), instead of subtly shaming you for not following a more traditional approach. We know from conformity studies that finding a ‘co-conspirator’ can be so emboldening. I highly recommend for graduate students to attend CommSciCon at least once. Find some co-conspirators. You’ll feel more empowered to communicate clearly for the rest of your career.
I also participated in a panel discussion on science translation at one of SIOP’s annual conferences that was really fun. It was also a packed session. There is so much need for good translation skills.
Juliya: How has your training as an I-O Psychologist impacted your interests or the way you approach your work on science communication?
Mike: I-O Psychology taught me that if you want to affect change, you have to convince stakeholders at every level of the organization, especially non-technical leaders. And to do that, you can’t just throw dry technical documents with correlations and other statistics at them. You need to be able to communicate in ways that resonate and motivate — emotionally, not just logically. As an I-O Psychologist, you’re competing with pop business magazines that can sell people on anything, but are often light on substance and evidence. Having better science isn’t enough for us. We need to have better science and out-sizzle the business magazines.
Juliya: What kind of practical outcomes do you hope to see from your work? What outcomes have you already seen?
Mike: My goal in doing this is to accelerate knowledge dissemination between scientists, and in doing so speed up the pace of scientific discovery itself. I want better science communication to help us cure diseases and eliminate hunger faster, reach the stars sooner. The stakes are that high for me.
So far, a lot of people across science—presenting at a variety of conferences—have already adopted (and improved on!) my new #betterposter design for scientific posters. It’s incredible. And my favorite part is that they’re generally reporting very positive experiences with it, both as presenters and attendees. There are now plans for three different conferences to adopt this new poster design as a requirement for all their posters.
But for me, the poster is just the beginning of a war. I know that sounds dramatic, but that’s how it feels. Maybe 1-3% of conference posters are now using more effective designs inspired by the #betterposter viral video and movement. Great. We’ve won a few battles, but most posters are still illegible walls of text, and most findings are lost in the noise. As a conference attendee walking into a poster session, you still miss out on 80% of the posters because of their poor design. It’s on me and other people who care about this issue to help, by getting user experience design principles into the workflows of every single remaining scientist. Then, even if we succeed at that, there are still potentially worse issues of inefficient presentations, publishing systems, etc. But, given the positive response to changing the poster, I’d say we’re off to a good start!
Juliya: You’re clearly very creative. Do you feel like being an I-O Psychologist gives you adequate opportunity to express your creativity?
Mike: Thanks! I-O Psychology has certainly helped me understand my own creativity (after all, creativity is something we study!). Being exposed to I-O research on creativity in the workplace has helped me feel less weird for being a creative type in a technical field, which helps me feel more confident about expressing that side.
My fellow I-O Psychologists are also a constant source of inspiration; they’re wonderful, smart, creative people and I love them. It also helps that the culture of MSU’s Organizational Psychology doctoral program is highly supportive and entrepreneurial.
Juliya: Is there anything else you’d like to share to help convey the importance of improving science communication, or to highlight more generally the impact I-Os can make?
Mike: My favorite question to ask new I-Os is “What’s the second reason you want to be an I-O Psychologist?” Their first reason is often something like “I-O seemed like a profitable and interesting career.” But their second reason is usually some frustration they have with the world, or something they’re really curious about.
I would recommend for new I-O students to dive into that second reason as soon as possible. It’s pretty much a given that you’ll have a career if you get an I-O graduate degree, so use your research as an opportunity to fight for your cause. Don’t work on other people’s projects only. Start at least one of your own. You’ll actually want to effect change and will persist longer. You’ll force yourself to get really good at communicating your message—to write better and present better.
I-O Psychology, to me, is one of the most powerful fields of science. I-O can give you the knowledge to attack virtually any human problem. You change work, you change the world. Pick something that frustrates you about the world, and try to fix it. You’ll get farther than you might think.
Want to learn more about Mike’s work? You can listen to his recent NPR interview here. Want to learn more about the field of I-O psychology? Read our earlier blog posts for an overview, to find out other ways I-O psychologists have given back to society, and to discover your dream job in the field.
