Posts tagged professionals
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Sleep deprivation can influence professional behavior
August 8, 2012 By Lia Samson
(Phys.org) — In a recent paper, Aleksander Ellis of the University of Arizona Eller College of Management and a colleague demonstrate that lack of sleep can cause deviant behavior at work.
Early 2011 saw a spate of reports in the media about air traffic controllers sleeping on the job as a result of sleep deprivation. The potential harm from this behavior is obvious, but what about the average office job? Can sleep deprivation cause counterproductive, or even unethical, behavior in organizations?
“Over the past decade, Americans have been getting less and less sleep, and estimates are that this trend will continue,” said Professor of Management and Organizations Aleksander Ellis, the Charles and Candice Nelson Fellow. “In fact, in certain industries, lack of sleep is worn as a badge of honor.”
In a recent paper published in the Academy of Management Journal, Ellis and co-author Michael Christian of Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill demonstrate that lack of sleep can cause deviant behavior.
In one part of the study, for instance, the researchers asked a group of subjects to respond to an email that contained colloquial language and misspellings. One of the sleep-deprived subjects responded with an unprofessional, personal attack. This is just one example Ellis and Christian cite to demonstrate how sleep deprivation reduces self-control and increases hostility.
Ellis and Christian are currently working on a parallel project that examines how sleep deprivation affects the tendency of individuals to behave unethically by conforming to the behavior of unethical authority figures.
Source: PHYS.ORG
Opinion: Scientists’ Intuitive Failures
Much of what researchers believe about the public and effective communication is wrong.
Scientists in the United States and Europe have long been concerned with how well the public understands science, whether or not the media adequately covers science, and how the public reaches decisions on complex science-related policy issues. Given the norms of our profession, however, it is ironic that many of these debates about how to best communicate science with lay populations are driven by intuitive assumptions on the part of scientists rather than the growing body of social science research on the topic that has developed over the past 2 decades.
In May, more than 500 researchers, journalists, and policy professionals gathered at the National Academies in Washington, DC, for a 2-day forum on the “Science of Science Communication” to dispel some of these intuitive but persistent myths about science, the media, and the public.
1. Americans no longer trust scientists. Prominent scientists warn that we have entered a new “dark age,” where the public no longer trusts scientific expertise.
2. Science journalism is dead. Though scientists are often critical of the news media, calling attention to perceived bias on the part of journalists, they also fear that budget cuts at news organizations have meant the death of science journalism.
3. Entertainment media promote a culture of anti-science. Since the 1970s, scientists have feared that entertainment TV and film undermine public trust in science.
4. The problem is the public, not scientists or policymakers. Scientists have long believed that when the public disagreed with them on matters of policy, public ignorance was to blame.
5. Political views don’t influence the judgments of scientists. In debating science-related policy matters, we tend to assume that scientists are not influenced by their own political views. Yet in a recent study co-authored by one of us (Scheufele), we find that even after controlling for their scientific judgments, scientists’ political ideologies significantly influence their preferences for potential regulatory policies.