2 IWO Psychology as a Science
2.1 Science
The online Oxford Dictionary of English (2025) has a good definition for science:
the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation, experimentation, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained:
“the world of science and technology” · “science laboratories”
- a particular area of science:
“veterinary science” · “the agricultural sciences”- a systematically organized body of knowledge on a particular subject:
“the science of criminology”
As you can see, the word science can refer to any and all of these:
- any (scientific) process for studying something (e.g., “IWO psychologists use science to study people in the context of work”);
- any topic that is studied via a scientific method (e.g., behavioral sciences);
- any collection of scientifically-derived knowledge on a topic (e.g., “the science of personality indicates that people are complicated…”).
What makes science so special is how it helps us figure out what’s true. There are many ways in which people try to figure out what’s true. Some people rely on others’ authority to figure out what’s true. Others may rely on consensus to figure out what’s true. Others may rely on intuition to figure out what’s true. And still others may rely on logic to figure out what’s true. However, scientific methods emphasize systematic empirical observations to figure out what’s true. Scientists still use logic, consensus, intuition, and (sometimes) authority to figure out what’s true, but a feature that distinguishes science is systematic empirical observations. An observation is empirical if it is based on and/or verifiable by experiences, rather than only theory or logic. Therefore, systematic empirical observations are repeatable, reasonable, logical, and they’re based on lived experiences.
A useful word here is epistemology, which is:
The theory of knowledge and understanding, esp. with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion; (as a count noun) a particular theory of knowledge and understanding.
(Oxford English Dictionary, 2025)
The epistemology of science emphasizes systematic empirical observations as an important way to figure out what’s true.
Despite rigorous research methods, any scientifically-derived knowledge is almost always tentative and subject to revision based on new empirical results. In other words, scientifically-derived knowledge is still fallible. Thus, researchers—including those in the behavioral sciences such as IWO psychology—tend to hedge their conclusions by using language such as: “the results suggest that…”, “the results may indicate that…” “the results provide support for…”.
2.2 IWO Psychology as a science
For each topic that is scientifically studied (e.g., biology, physics, psychology, etc.), the scientists who study those topics use special tools and methods—and the same is true for IWO psychology. To help contextualize the scientific approaches that are typically used in IWO psychology, I’ll now introduce a couple more -ologies: axiology and praxiology. Axiology is:
The study of the nature of value and valuation, and of the kinds of things that are valuable.
- A particular theory of axiology
(Oxford Dictionary of English, 2025)
When we talk about the axiology of IWO psychology, we’re talking about the IWO psychologists’ typical principles or beliefs about what they generally consider important. In other words, we’re talking about what IWO psychologists value.
Relatedly, the praxiology (also spelled praxeology) of IWO psychology is a set of propositions about the actions that IWO psychologists should do in their praxis, and about what they actually do.
Praxis is also known as practice, but it doesn’t mean beginner training. Rather, praxis is like the word practice in medical practice, clinical practice, or IWO psychology practitioner. Scholars often use the word praxis instead of practice to disambiguate between those two senses of practice. So when we say praxis, we’re referring to the application of some skill or ability, as a practitioner would.
Obviously, the axiology and praxiology of IWO psychology evolve over time, and it can never be described perfectly because it is a generalization about all IWO psychologists. However, in the following sections, we can try to describe its historical development and current state.
2.2.1 The axiology and praxiology of IWO psychology
There are several excellent summaries of the historical development of IWO psychology in the USA as a field of science and praxis. Consider reading Salas et al. (2017) and Porter and Schneider (2014). For the enthusiast, Cascio and Aguinis (2008) and Katzell and Austin (1992) are other good (though older) resources.
In a nutshell, IWO psychology in the USA has historically been dominated by an axiology that values quantitative rigor and a balance between science and praxis—hence the classic term: the scientist–practitioner approach in IWO psychology. Historically, the praxiology of IWO psychologists has prominently featured the study of people situated in real work-contexts (though laboratory studies have also played an important role). Such studies typically involve a hypothesis and a quantitative analysis of data in an attempt to evaluate the truth-value of the hypothesis (often via falsificationism), and hopefully benefit the company and workers being studied and/or other workers more broadly. All of this is quite standard among many scientific disciplines.
My goal in mentioning all of that is to present to you a vocabulary that can enable you to think about and talk about the way IWO psychologists do their work today. Equipped with such language, you can have greater acuity in your analyses of the work of other IWO psychologists, and you can have greater self-awareness of your tendencies and preferences in doing IWO psychology work.
Stance can be a good word to describe an overall orientation or approach for inquiry. For example, someone could have a critical stance, or a practical stance, or a combination of several stances. For an excellent introduction to the typical stances that researchers adopt, see Craig (2009). For brevity, here are some of the most commonly discussed stances:
- Empirical-explanatory stance: This stance is probably what you were taught in science class in grade school. In this stance, researchers typically seek to explain phenomena in an objective manner that is devoid of judgment about whether those phenomena are “good or bad,” and they typically do that by creating testable hypotheses and analyzing empirical data.
- Practical stance: The main distinguishing features of the practical stance are its axiology and praxiology. It seeks to not only understand and explain phenomena, but also to take action to improve the human condition by solving concrete problems. One popular method is known as participatory action research, in which the intended beneficiaries of some solution are involved as partners in co-creating those solutions with the researchers.
- Critical stance: The main distinguishing features of the critical stance are its axiology and praxiology. A core aim of the critical stance is to emancipate society from conditions that perpetuate injustice (e.g., unjust power relations)—in other words, justice is a common feature of its axiology. Persons operating in the tradition of the critical stance tend to be politically active (i.e., that’s a common feature of their praxiology).
- Interpretive stance: According to this stance, it is important that the significance of human action be interpreted from the meaning that humans attribute to their own actions. Thus, the focus isn’t so much on general cause-mechanism theories that are devoid of rich context. A prominent feature of its axiology is the intrinsic worth of understanding the culture and history of the persons being studied.
Traditionally, the field of IWO psychology has operated with a blend of the empirical-explanatory stance (to understand what’s going on) and the practical stance (to help do something good about what’s going on). However, this was primarily due to the culture of the researchers that dominated the field of IWO psychology in its early days in the early-to-mid 1900s. Often, their goal was to understand humans in the context of work, so that their performance could be enhanced (typically for the benefit of the company). Compared to those early days, today there are many more IWO psychologists who skillfully adopt a critical stance and/or interpretive stance, and other stances. Likewise, many IWO psychologists today have a much broader set of topics they focus on, including the wellbeing of workers for its own sake (not simply as a stepping stone toward greater profits), and the social responsibilities of companies.
I encourage you to explore these and other stances for inquiry, and discover which stance(s) resonate with you, and have confidence in the power of being flexible to adopt different stances when they are warranted.
2.2.2 The epistemology of IWO psychology
Most likely, when you were in grade school, you were taught in science class to specify a hypothesis and then test it via an empirical study. That approach is known as hypothetico-deductivism. Deductivism comes from the word deductive, which is often used to describe a type of reasoning known as deductive reasoning: a type of logical inference which starts with a set of premises (which are assumed to be true) and ends with a conclusion that must be true if the argument is logically valid and if the premises are true. In contrast, inductive reasoning is a type of inference in which you use a set of observations or evidence to support the belief that a particular conclusion is possible (or even probable), even though the observations/evidence aren’t enough to prove that the conclusion is certainly true. Deductive and inductive reasoning are perhaps easiest to explain via examples, which I’ve provided in Table 2.1.
| Deductive reasoning | Inductive reasoning |
|---|---|
| We believe that any of our departments that switch to flexible scheduling are more likely than not to experience a reduction in voluntary turnover. If we’re right, and another of our departments switches to flexible schedules, it will likely see a reduction in voluntary turnover. | In three departments that switched to flexible schedules, voluntary turnover fell noticeably; therefore, we believe flexible scheduling likely reduces turnover across the organization. |
| We believe our company’s structured interviews produce performance-ratings that are more accurate than unstructured interviews. If we’re right, and our company uses both structured and unstructured interviews for the next hiring season, we should see more accurate results from the structured ones than the unstructured ones. | During this hiring season, structured interviews resulted in higher-accuracy supervisor-rated performance than the unstructured ones; thus, we believe structured interviews likely have better predictive validity in our company. |
Hypothetico-deductivism is the research approach in which the first step is to specify a theory about whatever you’re interested in. Then, from that theory, we use deductive reasoning to create an empirically-testable proposition, which we call a hypothesis, to test our theory. Typically, we would test our theory by analyzing some empirical data. Technically speaking, there is often a lot of inductive reasoning involved when you use your analyses to make an inference about whether your hypothesis and/or theory is true—but we still call the entire approach hypothetico-deductivism because of the focal step of deductively creating a hypothesis from a theory.
In subsequent lectures in this course, I will guide you through a more formal definition of theory.
Another important way to think about the epistemology of IWO psychology is in terms of confirmatory versus exploratory modes of research. In confirmatory research, we seek to test a theory, to help us accumulate evidence that will (hopefully someday) help us decide whether the theory is true or not. In exploratory research, we seek to discover patterns in the data, without focusing on testing any specified theory. Both confirmatory and exploratory modes of research are useful, although you may notice a lot of IWO psychology research has traditionally been confirmatory (probably because of how those researchers were taught to do research).
2.2.2.1 Falsificationism is an important aspect of the epistemology of IWO Psychology
IWO psychologists usually want to understand and help many people, not just one person. For example, an IWO Psychologist might ask, “How can we help construction workers feel more willing to point out safety risks at work?” or “What would help service workers feel less emotionally drained at the end of their workday?” We typically aren’t interested in figuring out why your specific coworker is in a bad mood today, but we are interested in understanding the factors that would generally cause any worker to be in a bad mood. We typically aren’t interested in understanding whether your Uncle Joe is more satisfied at work after receiving a higher salary, but we are interested in understanding the effect that higher salaries generally have on workers’ satisfaction. See the difference? IWO Psychologists are usually interested in figuring out general truths that apply to many people, not specific truths that only apply to one person.
To help discover those general truths that apply to many people, IWO Psychologists use an important strategy that many scientists use: falsificationism. According to falsificationism, the best way to figure out whether a statement is true (or not) is to try to find evidence that would disprove the statement. Why? It’s because the statements that IWO Psychologists typically want to evaluate are often difficult or impossible to prove true (unless we’re able to observe every person our ideas are about), but the statements can be much easier to disprove (i.e., prove them false).
Falsificationism is an important concept in the philosophy of science. There’s a lot more I could say about it, but I’ll leave that for you to explore on your own for now.
For example, if we have a hunch that USA nurses who are more conscientious than average have higher salaries than average, we can’t say we’ve proven that statement true unless we’ve somehow observed every nurse in the USA. However, if we find even one nurse who is more conscientious than average but has a lower salary than another nurse who is less conscientious than average, we’ve already disproven the statement. You see? When you have a theory that is attempting to describe a large number of people, it’s often much easier to disprove that theory than to prove it true.
On the other hand, if we try our best to systematically observe as many USA nurses as we can, and we end up observing one thousand such nurses and none of them disprove our theory, then we can say our theory so far has successfully stood against a rigorous test (one thousand observations!). We still haven’t proven our theory true (unless we literally observe every nurse in the USA), but the evidence so far seems to support our theory.
Keep in mind: we usually don’t say a theory has been proven false just because of one observation. Instead, we prefer systematic empirical evidence. In other words, we’d like to see a consistent pattern of evidence, rather than just one observation that might be an outlier or an anomaly.
Obviously, if we try our best to find systematic empirical evidence that would disprove a theory, but all of those attempts fail to disprove the theory, then we can start to have more confidence that perhaps our theory might be true—even though we haven’t proven that our theory is true. That is why scientists—including IWO Psychologists—typically say things like: “the results suggest that the theory is true…”, or “the results provide support for the theory…”, or “the results indicate the theory may be true…”.
2.3 A brief introduction to the types of scholarly works in IWO psychology
In subsequent lectures in this course, we will dive into understanding the different types of scholarly works that IWO psychologists produce. At this point in this course, it would be useful for you to have a basic familiarity with these types:
- empirical research: any research that involves analyzing empirical data, rather than only theorizing.
- theoretical research: any research that focuses on theories, rather than analyzing empirical data. For example, it may describe, compare, and/or critique one or more theories.
- lab research: any research that involves the analysis of empirical data that was collected about people (or other organisms or objects) while they were in a laboratory context.
- field research: any research that involves the analysis of empirical data that was collected about people behaving in their natural settings, such as a real workplace, rather than in a laboratory. Even if a laboratory is decorated to look like a natural setting, it’s not considered a field study.
- literature-review research: any research that focuses on analyzing multiple research articles or other research outputs (e.g., reports, posters, etc.), typically to summarize and synthesize the current state of the science on some topic, but without doing a formal analysis of the aggregated data from those other studies. Typically, a literature-review study will culminate in a literature-review paper.
- meta-analysis research: similar to a literature-review research, except a good meta-analysis typically involves a systematic approach for identifying the studies that will be included or excluded from the meta-analysis, and the meta-analysis must also involve a systematic analysis of the aggregated data across all of the studies that were included in the meta-analysis. Most often, meta-analyses are quantitative, but they can also be qualitative, and/or mixed-methods.
2.4 A brief note on pre-registration
Pre-registration is a process or result of producing publicly-verifiable time-stamped evidence about the future plans for a research project (e.g., “she is pre-registering her hypothesis”, “I’m reading his pre-registered plan of analysis”). The most commonly pre-registered items are hypotheses and plans for how the data will be analyzed (you can pre-register anything you want, such as a written statement of your theories and/or the expected implications of your study).
One of the primary purposes of pre-registration is to prevent some types of HARKing: Hypothesizing After the Results are Known. HARKing is the act of creating a hypothesis after you’ve already analyzed the data and seen the results about that hypothesis. For example, suppose I collect some data about worker motivation and salary, and then I analyze the data and find that motivation is positively correlated with salary in my dataset. At that point, if I hypothesize that motivation is positively correlated with salary, I’ve just HARKed.
Scholarly discussions about HARKing distinguish between SHARKing—Secretly HARKing—versus THARKing—Transparently HARKing (Hollenbeck & Wright, 2017). HARKing isn’t necessarily a problem. THARKing is definitely not a problem, and in many cases it is arguably unethical not to THARK (Hollenbeck & Wright, 2017). But SHARKing is definitely unethical. For a scholarly analysis of the various problems caused by SHARKing, see Murphy and Aguinis (2019), Hollenbeck and Wright (2017), and Kerr (1998).
Pre-registering your hypotheses and other aspects of your research plan is a great way to establish evidence that you’re being honest and transparent. That’s important for increasing other people’s trust in science—especially for gaining the trust of the general population that might be skeptical about science. Many scholarly journals are increasingly requiring pre-registered study materials for papers that wish to be published in those journals.
In a subsequent lecture in this course, I will describe a popular website for pre-registering your studies, called the Open Science Framework https://osf.io.
Almost all theories and their subsequent hypotheses are based on our observations of the world around us. Therefore, you might be thinking: “aren’t all hypotheses ultimately created after we already know some results about the world around us?” This brings up an important distinction. Let’s suppose you are analyzing the correlation of two variables—worker motivation and salary—but you forgot to create a hypothesis beforehand. After you analyze the data, you see motivation is positively correlated with salary.
You would be SHARKing if you say “Here’s my hypothesis, which I made before I analyzed the data.”
However, if you see the correlation is positive in the first dataset and then you hypothesize that the positive correlation will occur in a new dataset that you haven’t analyzed yet, then you’re doing good science if you say “Based on my observations from the first dataset, I hypothesize that the correlation will be positive in the new dataset.” After that, you can collect the new data to test your hypothesis. See the difference?
2.5 Suggested Readings
The only readings I suggest on the topics in this lecture are the ones I’ve already cited in these lecture notes, which you can see in the References section immediately below. All of those are available in our shared Zotero Group Library for this course.