The Personality Meta-Blog

Scientific personality psychology has had a bit of a renaissance in the last few decades, emerging from a period of deep skepticism and subsequent self-reflection to a period  where we believe there are robust findings in our field. The problem is that many people, and scientists, don’t follow scientific personality psychology and remain blithely unaware of the field’s accomplishments. In fact, it is quite common to do silly things like equate the field of scientific personality psychology with the commodity that is the MBTI. With this situation in mind, I recently asked a subset of personality psychologists to help  identify what they believed to be robust findings in personality psychology.  You will find the product of that effort below. We are not assuming that we’ve identified all of the robust findings.  In fact, we’d like you to vote on each one to see whether these are consensually defined “robust findings.”  Moreover, we’d love you to comment and suggest other candidates for consideration. All we ask is that you characterize the finding and suggest some research that backs up your suggestion.  We’ve kept things pretty loose to this point, but the items below can be characterized as findings that replicate across labs and have a critical mass of research that is typically summarized in one or more meta-analyses. We are open to suggestions about making the inclusion criteria more stringent. Continue reading →

How about a little blast from the past?  In rooting around in an old hard drive searching for Pat Hill’s original CV [1], I came across a document that we wrote way back in 2006 on how to write more effectively. It was a compilation of the collective wisdom at that time of Roberts, Fraley, and Diener. It was interesting to read after 13 years. Fraley and I have updated our opinions a bit. We both thought it would be good to share if only for the documentation of our pre-blogging, pre-twitter thought processes. Manuscript Acronyms from Hell:  Lessons We’ve Learned on Writing the Empirical Research Article  By Brent Roberts (with substantial help from Ed Diener and Chris Fraley) Originally written sometime in 2006 Updated 2019 thoughts in blue Here are a set of subtle lessons that we’ve culled from our experience writing journal articles.  They are intended as a short list of questions that you can ask yourself each time you complete an article.  For example, before you submit your paper to a journal, ask yourself whether you have created a clear need for the study in the introduction, or whether everything is parallel, etc.  This list is by no means complete, but we do hope that it is useful. Continue reading →