R0007/2026-03-19/C003 — Claim Definition¶
Claim as Received¶
Their 2014 follow-up found that 82.5% of 229 samples had significantly heavy right tails.
Claim as Clarified¶
The claim asserts that a follow-up paper by O'Boyle/Aguinis published in 2014 found that 82.5% of 229 productivity samples exhibited statistically significant heavy right tails. The implicit assumption is that this is the 2014 "Star Performers" paper in Personnel Psychology.
BLUF¶
The statistic (82.53% of 229 samples) is confirmed but comes from Aguinis et al. (2016) "Cumulative Advantage: Conductors and Insulators of Heavy-Tailed Productivity Distributions" in Personnel Psychology, not from a 2014 paper. The 2014 paper is a conceptual review.
Scope¶
- Domain: Organizational behavior / performance distributions
- Timeframe: 2014-2016 publications
- Testability: Verifiable via the published papers
Assessment Summary¶
Probability: Likely (55-80%)
Confidence: Medium
Hypothesis outcome: H2 supported — the statistic is real but misattributed to 2014 instead of 2016.
[Full assessment in assessment.md.]
Status¶
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Date created | 2026-03-19 |
| Date completed | 2026-03-19 |
| Researcher profile | Not provided |
| Prompt version | Unified Research Standard 1.0-draft |
| Revisit by | N/A — historical fact |
| Revisit trigger | If the 2014 paper is confirmed to also contain this statistic |