This is a personal account of the stages through which my thinking and my research career unfolded, beginning with student socialization into questionnaire-based survey research, through originating implicit leadership theory, to initiating “respite research” to study the effects of stress on strain without causal ambiguity, and finally to my adoption of field experimentation as the most internally and externally valid research method. It was a journey of breaking free of popular survey research methods and embracing causally unambiguous experimentation. It struck home for many, inasmuch as almost all the articles that my students and colleagues and I submitted reporting randomized field experiments were accepted for publication in top-tier journals. I describe my transition from survey research to field experimentation as it unfolded, provide successive examples of field experiments, and press home the major lesson: field experiments are doable, replicatable, and causally unambiguous. Moreover, they provide actionable cause-and-effect results that can propel our science forward and put useful tools into the hands of practitioners.

这是我的思想和我的研究生涯展开阶段的个人描述，从学生社会化开始到基于问卷的调查研究，通过内隐领导理论的起源，再到启动“喘息研究”来研究压力对压力的影响，而不是因果模棱两可，最后我采用现场实验作为最内部和外部有效的研究方法。这是一次摆脱流行的调查研究方法并接受因果关系明确的实验的旅程。它让许多人感到震惊，因为我和我的学生和同事提交的报告随机现场实验的几乎所有文章都被顶级期刊接受了。我描述了我从调查研究到现场实验的转变，因为它展开了，提供田间试验的连续例子，并强调主要教训：田间试验是可行的、可复制的、因果关系明确的。此外，它们提供了可操作的因果结果，可以推动我们的科学向前发展，并将有用的工具交到从业者手中。