Having worked now for several years in the field of learning and development in the corporate world, I’m used to seeing psychological concepts being used and abused, distorted or just over-simplifed. Most of the times it happens with theories that are intuitively appealing, but have now been proven incorrect, or with findings that have been taken out of context to create a best selling book on a certain business topic.
One of the things I do as part of my job is to develop and deliver content that other trainers will use with their learners. This means that a great deal of care goes into justifying the methods I choose to deliver the content. For example, I will tell the trainers why I chose to use a role-play activity to explain a certain subject instead of presenting a diagram or a video. And every so often comes the discussion around “learning styles” – which I came to realise many trainers assume is a tested and proven psychological theory.
