Lovaglia's Law

One of our next guest columns will be from Michael Lovaglia, Professor and Department Chair in the Sociology Department at the Iowa.  Jeff Pfeffer and I first started talking with Michael when he sent us a stunning email on “Lovaglia’s Law,” which he defined as The more important the outcome of a decision, the more people will resist using evidence to make it. I described and commented on in a post a couple month ago on my blog, www.bobsutton.net.  The impact of Michael’s little insight was striking, as it provoked a lot of comments from my reader’s and on other blogs. In fact, I just put "Lovaglia’s Law" into Google, and it returned 657 results, many from bloggers who commented on and applied the law.  It seems to have rung true with many people, and Michael and his colleagues are doing research to test the law, especially conditions under which it holds and does not hold.

I also had some interesting exchanges with readers on my blog about what Michael meant by a “law,” as I thought I made clear that he – and I – made clear that he was articulating a hypothesis (albeit one that is consistent with other published research), but I realized that I had better put up a posting explaining that the law was an interesting hypothesis rather a proven fact or confirmed finding.

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Posted in Beliefs and assumptions by Bob Sutton | | Permalink | Comments (0)