I-O psychology should not be extended to animals

Hernandez et al. (2025) propose that I-O psychology should include animals as workers.We agree with Hernandez et al. on several points, including that some animals engage in work alongside humans and/or in place of humans, and like humans, animals have KSAOs that make animals suited to complete some tasks and not others.However, we disagree with Hernandez et al. that applying an approach to studying human work (i.e., I-O psychology) to animals will yield particularly interesting insights into working animals or into I-O psychology.This commentary has two main sections.First, we discuss philosophy of science principles relative to the application of one scientific project to another.Second, we examine two key differences between animals and humans to demonstrate that it is unlikely that I-O psychology will be a productive framework for understanding animal work. Applying a scientific framework to another phenomenonFrom a philosophy of science perspective, frameworks are general and highly flexible perspectives that typically can be applied to a broad range of phenomena.Disciplines in science (like I-O psychology) include a collection of similar and related frameworks, often called theories.Frameworks make scientists describe phenomena in a particular way and thereby direct the scientist to particular kinds of questions.Different frameworks lead to different research questions about the same phenomenon.For example, an economics framework would see a worker as an item that has costs and benefits to their employer (e.g., training costs, compensation, widgets produced) and leads inevitably to the question: does this worker produce a good return on investment?Hernandez et al. want I-O psychology to be extended to working animals.They draw parallels between their efforts and Bergman and Jean's (2016) paper that criticizes I-O psychology's overreliance on POSH (professional, office-based, safe from harm, in high-income countries) workers and underrepresenting employees who are earning wages, first-line, contract or gig, and low-to-medium skill.However, Hernandez et al.'s project is completely different from Bergman and Jean's.Hernandez et al. want to extend I-O psychology to what it has not previously covered to describe phenomena in new ways.In contrast, Bergman and Jean argued that a phenomenon (non-POSH workers) have always been within I-O psychology's framework, they were just underrepresented in empirical and theoretical work.Bergman and Jean argued that increased study of non-POSH workers would improve how much we know about them, including how they differ from POSH workers, thereby teaching us more about POSH workers too, resulting in a more robust and effective I-O psychology.