Bad Science

Reginald Sample is a recent Industrial/Organizational Psychology graduate from the University of Jankytown and was hired as a junior employee at I/O Consultants of DC. This firm specializes in employee engagement and developing novel solutions to increase employee productivity while simultaneously lowering attrition. The company has worked hard to build a reputation of carefully utilizing the scientific method to determine how best to help their clients.

Reginald's first assignment: A company is trying to assess the effects of extending their employee's lunch period, from 30 to 45 minutes, on employee productivity. The CEO specifically wants to increase the number of widgets that each employee produces. Therefore, the company hired I/O Consultants of DC, and Reginald was put on the case. Even though this is Reginald's first job ever, he knows that everybody knows that employees enjoy longer breaks and he sets out to set up an experiment to prove it.

Reginald wonders... what is the effect of increased employee breaks on employee productivity? Reginald believes that having a bit more time to relax or pickup lunch during their break will lead to better productivity. He decides to secretly assess the employees for an entire month to measure employee productivity. As it happens, this experiment is happening in December- the same month that employees get a $1,500 bonus if they exceed November's productivity. This is no secret- most employees slack off in November and then work harder in December to ensure they can get that bonus in order to buy the new Playstation 5 (if they can find it in stock). Reginald sorts the employees into two groups: employees still on probation and employees that have been with the company for years. The new probationary employees receive the extended lunch breaks while the longer-tenure employees do not.

Results: After the month was over, Reginald looked at the results of each individual employee. Shockingly, individual employee widget production was through the roof for BOTH groups! He didn't quite know how it happened, but he was excited at the results. With proof that the extended lunch breaks helped, he promptly provides the study results to his supervisor.

His supervisor read the report and fired Reginald on the spot.

Your assignment:

Identify the elementsfrom the prompt,and state whether you've identified any issues: If there are issues, identify them and state what they should have been. If there aren't any issues, explain why it was appropriate.

1. Research question - if any
2. Hypothesis - if any
3. Dependent variable - if any
4. Confounding variable - if any
5. Random assignment
6. Independent variable - if any
7. Control group - if any