People

Presently I am working to leverage my quantitative lines of research to develop novel methodologies to address several classic questions in psychology. For example, are some people better judges of character and personality than others and, if so, how can we identify these individuals? An extensive line of research on this topic ground to a halt in the 1950's when Lee Cronbach wrote a series of devastating and rather impenetrable articles criticizing existing methodology (e.g., Cronbach, 1955). Research to that point essentially labeled a person a good "judge" if their impressions measured on rating scales literally did not differ from some standard. Common standards - as there is no truly objective standard of personality - include self-reports of the persons being judged, or, more typically, the social consensus regarding that person. For example, a person would be labeled a good judge if his or her ratings of a specific individual (the target) did not differ from the group's average rating of that specific person on various measures of personality (e.g., Extraversion, Conscientiousness, etc.). Unfortunately many different measurement artifacts could influence this approach. For instance, a person who consistently used one end of the rating scale might be labeled a poor judge.

Cronbach's proposed solution was, essentially, to label a person a good judge if his or her impressions across a series of different targets (persons being judged) correlated highly with the standard for those individuals. This of course created a more difficult research environment as gathering a single impression was no longer sufficient. Instead a series of impressions across many different individuals was required, resulting in more time and labor-intensive data collection. Regardless, interest in broad questions of individual differences in social perception is currently being renewed within psychology.

At the same time, the quantitative methodology to examine questions of social perception has essentially remained unchanged since Cronbach's critiques and assumes that impressions are measured without error. Without disentangling measurement error from impression ratings and modeling both simultaneously, many critical questions cannot be asked within current frameworks. For example, are there real individual differences in social perception? In other words, does meaningful (and significant) variability exist among individuals in the social perception of personality? Does the domain matter - for instance, are there more individual differences in perceptions of Extraversion than Conscientiousness? How does one examine and analyze individual differences in social perception within an experimental context? For example, can we motivate individuals to be better social perceivers? To these ends I am in the process of adapting quantitative methodology (e.g., random regression models) to examine differences among individuals in their perceptions of others.

Over the past three years I have collected and analyzed data that strongly suggest that the quantitative methodologies for examining individual differences in social perception that I developed are both practical and useful. Over the next several years my two primary research goals are (1) to write methodological articles outlining how to adapt random regression coefficient models to questions of social perception and (2) to collect additional data and produce a substantive body of research answering these classic questions. In short, developing and refining the quantitative methodology to appropriately ask these questions and then answering these questions is the primary focus of my research programs.

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