J
jeremy
35 minutes
Writing About the Layoff for Twenty Minutes Sped Reemployment
After a computer company laid off a hundred senior engineers, four months passed and not one had found work. Spera, Buhrfeind and Pennebaker (Academy of Management Journal, 1994) used that group for an experiment. Forty-one recently laid-off professionals were randomly assigned either to write for twenty minutes a day, five days running, about their deepest thoughts and feelings about losing the job, or to a control condition that wrote for the same time about their plans for the day. A further 22 people who did no writing were followed as a non-randomized comparison. Over the next eight months, 53 percent of the expressive-writing group found full-time work, against 24 percent of the time-management writers and 14 percent of the non-writers. What is striking is what did not change: the groups did not differ in how many applications they sent or how hard they searched. The authors concluded the writing changed attitudes toward the old job and toward finding a new one, not search effort - people who had written appeared less hostile in the hiring process. The sample is small and the follow-up single, so this is a promising randomized result rather than a settled one. You can now try a cheap intervention with a real trial behind it, and know exactly how strong that trial was.