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Novel Approaches to Assessing Social Behavior and Individual Differences
INSTRUCTORS: Sam Gosling, Del Paulhus & William Fleeson
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Sam Gosling |
Del Paulhus |
William Fleeson |
The goal of this course is to encourage students to think broadly and creatively about how psychologists can understand and assess behavior. Too often personality and social psychologists rely on self-report methods and laboratory studies that emphasize convenience and control over ecological validity. The course will start by laying the basic measurement foundations on which an enormous variety of assessment approaches can be built. We shall take a hands-on approach to examine numerous unconventional ways to understand what people do and what people are like. Specific assessment topics will include:
- Unobtrusive trace measures (e.g., measuring behavioral residue in bedrooms, offices, etc.)
- Social Endocrinology (e.g., analysis of hormone levels)
- Behavior in virtual environments (e.g., virtual reality; virtual worlds)
- Analysis of language (e.g., in emails, IMs, spoken conversation)
- Behavioral assessment in humans and animals using human observers and nifty gadgetry
- Forensic assessment (e.g., self-report vs. interview methods)
- Scholastic cheating (e.g., Turn-It-In; S-Check programs)
- Detecting response biases (self-report vs. behavioral methods)
More important than the specific topics is the general approach in which students will be encouraged to develop their own methods tailored to their research questions.
Sam Gosling was born and educated in the UK. In 1993 he joined the Ph.D. program in Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, where he began his two core lines of research: Personality in non-human animals and how personality is expressed in everyday environments. At Berkeley Gosling began working with a colony of spotted hyenas to try and determine whether personality could be measured in animals. It was here that he also began examining how individuals leave traces of their personalities in their personal and work environments. In 1999 he joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is an Associate Professor of Psychology. In 2003-4 he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. At Austin he continues to pursue his personality research on the psychology of animals and environments.
Del Paulhus received his PhD from Columbia University and is now Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia. He also spent sabbatical years at UC Berkeley and UC Davis. Much of his research is related to issues of self-presentation although he has also contributed to the literatures on dark personalities, acquaintanceship, and conceptions of ntelligence. Over his career, he has developed a number of widely-used measures including the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding, the Spheres of Control inventory, the Over-Claiming Questionnaire, and the Self-Report Psychopathy scale.
William Fleeson has received training in personality, social, cognitive, and lifespan developmental psychology in his efforts to understand the whole person. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1992, postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Wake Forest University. His research interests include personality, self-regulation, adult development, and psychological well-being. Some current research focuses on computational microbehavioral psychological health; other current research focuses on distinguishing between those human efforts that lead to successful, satisfying lives and those that lead to dead ends, frustrated hopes, and wasted resources. He recently won the Society of Personality and Social Psychology’s Theoretical Innovation Prize for his work on intraindividual variability in personality.