Ever wonder who to follow on Twitter who might be tweeting about psychological science applied to the workplace? I want to share a list of active twitter users who are Industrial-Organizational Psychology practitioners. I have been inspired by a few recent events most notably “The 100 most followed psychologists and neuroscientists on Twitter!” list by the British Psychological Society (BPS). A very helpful list and I follow many of those.

A couple of areas I would like to address include the fact that the BPS list is based solely on number of followers. As good of a metric as any, although it does not weed out those who may not have tweeted in a couple of years. People may be popular to follow on twitter but if they have not tweeted since 2013, why bother? Another issue was the lack of those who specialize in Psychology applied to work. This was not the fault of the BPS, just the lack of very many I-O Psychology practitioners with a large number of followers (i.e., greater than 7,600). BPS (I may add) were fantastic about adding a few to their list I pointed out that they were unaware of when they compiled their list. For those unfamiliar with I-O Psych, I refer to this definition from SIOP: “Industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology is the scientific study of working and the application of that science to workplace issues facing individuals, teams, and organizations. The scientific method is applied to investigate issues of critical relevance to individuals, businesses, and society.”

Who is not on the present list?

This brings me to my list of #IOPsych pros to follow on twitter. I will admit upfront it is subjective since it is not based on number of followers. It is based on my observations of those who tend to tweet about employee selection, assessment, leadership development, org change, personality and other topic areas of psychological science applied to work. A few exclusion criteria:

Lack of tweets for the past six months likely means they are not on the list

Their training is in I-O Psych but they primarily tweet about other topics (soccer, rugby, politics, religion, food, art, music, market research, etc)

Their account is primarily automated and they do not interact on twitter

Their tweets may be of interest to a small minority in the discipline but fringe to the core areas of Industrial-Organizational Psychology

I-O firms, universities and associations have great information to share but you will find them easily if you go looking, I primarily want to highlight individuals.

Note, the bold font for every tenth listing was just to visually break up the list, not to emphasize those individuals.

So without further narrative here is the list!

Not on the list? Add yourself in the comments and I will be happy to update! I did is not intend to list all I-O Psychology professionals on twitter. This list could grow to be 10x as long (although that would be a lot of work). Also, I made a conscious choice to include regardless of academia versus practice. Hopefully twitter can be one tool to help narrow the scientist-practitioner gap! If we make an even 100 that would be optimal by me.

1/6/16 Update: Want an easy handy dandy way to follow the initial 80? Use this list compiled by Evan Sinar: https://twitter.com/EvanSinar/lists/ios

This was originally going to be a short list of 10–20, but it kept on growing. A few issues to note. It is North America-centric primarily due to my familiarity with US I-O Psych. I am happy to include more tweeters sharing relevant tweets. If they are using different hashtags (or not calling out this specialty) frankly I will miss it. Think about this— Work Psychology, Occupational Psychology, Business Psychology, Organizational Psych plus other variations = a lot to keep track of!

1/6/2016 Update: Two special I-O Psychology focused bloggers to follow are:

Adrian Furnham and Ron Riggio

Note, I decided not to focus on where people work, or how many followers they have. You can easily find that information. I chose to emphasize more what they tweet about and highlight quality twitter accounts. I can guarantee none of these accounts are twitter bots! I went to grad school with Evan Sinar, I met Aaron Kraus at SIOP, I have had arguments with Andrew Munro on Linkedin (plus he sent me one of his books) etc. Many people know Twitter is fantastic for events. However it can also be used to efficiently share information for application of psychological science to our work lives.

1/6/16 After 1 month I am editing in an addendum of 20 more to follow

Thank you for reading and happy tweeting!

P.S. Tony is technically not IO Psych by background and training. There many many people who do not come from the same discipline but share interests, passions and overlapping expertise. A very small sampling of honorable mention (please make sure to follow these accounts if interested in areas)