LAUSR

Rogelberg et al. (2022) do an excellent job of highlighting industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists’ struggle with making I-O psychology relevant to the public. However, we believe one important concept that contributes to this irrelevance needs to be further emphasized—that is, the phenomenon of “Wittgensteinian shortfall” (Martínez & Mammola, 2021). This is the notion that refers to the ineptitude to fully acquire the permeation pertaining to the special affinity across diverse systematic enterprises that build and organize knowledge about the universe. The last sentence illustrates the subject of our response article; jargon leads to confusion and, as we will describe later, division. Wittgensteinian shortfall is “the inability to successfully communicate specific ideas across unalike scientific communities” (Martínez & Mammola, 2021, p. 4). This tongue-in-cheek term was coined by Martínez and Mammola (2021) in an article that examined jargon and the number of citations in “cave research” of geologists, zoologists, anthropologists, ecologists, and evolutionary biologists. In their literature review they examined citation patterns associated with use of jargon in titles and abstracts. They found that, indeed, the use of jargon was negatively related to the number of citations. Their explanation for this negative correlation was that scientists review hundreds, if not thousands, of titles (and abstracts) a year and jargon prevents them from easily understanding the material. This explanation could be extrapolated beyond the scientists. We argue that through our profession’s jargon we are making our field more exclusive and out of reach to those who matter: the decision makers, policy makers, and the public. Although the origin of the word “jargon” comes from the sense of “twittering, chattering, and gibberish,” the more recent Oxford dictionary defines jargon as “special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand.” Attridge (1991) states that jargon is a “cardinal misuse of language” (p. 42) and that it is “external properties, sounds and shapes that signal exclusiveness, foreignness, technicality, artifice, but do no real intellectual work” (pp. 42–43). There appears to be a theme among the discussion of jargon: although it may not always be intentional, jargon is divisive—which can prevent our work from getting to a broader audience. In the focal article, Rogelberg et al. (2022) touch on the concept of jargon, such that they describe some articles using “dense academic language” and “do not even use the right words”. They even provide a more colorful description of our work, such that “we sound like eggheads”. We propose that for all the suggestions proposed in the focal article to be successful (e.g., blogs, trade journals, books, podcasts), we need to cut the jargon as a profession.