How Career Dreams Die

Just a bit of offbeat news for your Thursday morning (you know, we could never get the hang of Thursdays): New research shows exactly what it takes to kill someone’s career dreams.

Turns out, according to psychologists at Ohio State University, it’s not enough to tell a would-be opera singer that his voice is terrible or a would-be journalist that she can’t write an inverted pyramid worth a damn.

To really turn someone away from a desired career path, you must also spell out what bad things could result from taking the chosen course and failing.

“Educators are trying to lead students to the most realistic career options,” Patrick Carroll, a co-author of the study, said. “You want to encourage students to pursue their dreams, but you don’t want to give them false hope about their abilities and talents. It’s a fine line.

“This research is important to understanding how students make revisions in their career goals and decide which career possibilities should be abandoned as unrealistic given their current qualifications.

He conducted the study with about 150 students who were told about a business psychology program that would qualify them for lucrative jobs.

The students filled out a form to express interest in the new program, and provided their GPAs. They were then told that the minimum requirement for the program was a GPA .10 higher than whatever they put down.

In one of these groups, the “career advisor” — who actually worked with the researchers — simply pointed out that the students’ GPA was lower than the requirement.

In another group, the threat was raised slightly: the advisor told the participants that they weren’t what they were looking for in the program and that it was unlikely they would be admitted. But the advisor encouraged these participants to apply if they were interested, because they might be reviewed by a lenient admissions committee.

The last group received the strongest threat to their hopes of becoming a business psychologist: they were also told they were not qualified, but might sneak in with a lenient admission committee. But the advisor added that if that happened, the student would probably struggle with the high demands of the program and ultimately end up with no job prospects if he or she somehow managed to graduate.

To add to the threat, the advisor mentioned that he or she knew of cases at other schools where unqualified students couldn’t get placed in jobs after graduation and often ended up in low-paying office jobs unrelated to business psychology.

The final group showed the most self-doubt and were most interested in giving up on the (imaginary) program.

“We have a brilliant ability to spin, deflect or outright dismiss undesired evidence that we can’t do something,” Carroll said. “We try to find reasons to believe.”

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.