DAVID C. FUNDER Professor Ph.D., Stanford University, 1979 951-827-3938, david.funder@ucr.edu

The judgments of personality that are made both by psychologists and by “real people” provide a focus for my research. The research particularly concerns the circumstances under which such judgments are likely to be accurate.

This interest in accuracy naturally leads me to be concerned with the principles and techniques of personality assessment. Some of my research has concerned the construction and evaluation of various assessment techniques, including self-report measures of personality and judgments gathered from people who know well the persons who are judged. I have also written about the “person-situation controversy” within personality psychology, which has concerned the question of whether personality traits exist to a degree strong enough to merit their inclusion within psychological theory and practice. The other part of my research program examines the processes by which people come to make judgments of the personalities of themselves and each other in daily life. The Realistic Accuracy Model (Funder, 1995, 1999) posits that accurate personality judgment is the result of a four-stage, social-cognitive process in which the target person first emits a behavior that is relevant to the trait to be judged in a setting where this information is available to the perceiver, who must then detect and correctly utilize the information on the way to an accurate judgment. The most important implication of the RAM model is that accurate personality judgment is extremely difficult. The model also implies that the degree to which accurate personality judgment is likely is a function of four moderator variables: properties of the judge, the target, the trait that is judged, and the information – its quantity and quality – upon which the judgment is based.

This model and its implications is currently being explored through analyses of a large data set gathered with the support of a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. The data include videotaped samples of behavior from a large sample of research participants, along with peer reports of personality, clinical assessments based on a life history interview, and numerous personality inventories. The purpose of these analyses is to build towards comprehensive theory and practical advice that can explain how and why people are sometimes inaccurate, and sometimes accurate, in their judgments of personality (Krueger & Funder, in press).

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Krueger, J.I., & Funder, D.C. (in press). Towards a balanced social psychology: Causes, consequences, and cures for the problem-seeking approach to social behavior and cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences [target article].

Funder, D.C. (2004). The Personality Puzzle (3rd Edition). New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Funder, D.C. (1999). Personality Judgment: A Realistic Approach to Person Perception. San Diego: Academic Press.

Funder, D.C. (1995). On the accuracy of personality judgment: A realistic approach. Psychological Review, 102, 652-670.

Funder, D.C., Parke, R., Tomlinson-Keasey, C., & Widaman, K. (Eds.). Studying lives through time: Approaches to personality and development. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Kenrick, D.T., & Funder, D.C. (1988). Profiting from controversy: Lessons from the person-situation debate. American Psychologist, 43, 23-34.

Funder, D.C. (1987). Errors and mistakes: Evaluating the accuracy of social judgment. Psychological Bulletin, 101, 75-90.

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