Personality Psychology Podcast

#32 Narrative identity with Jonathan Adler, Kate McLean, and Monisha Pasupathi

In this episode, Lisanne de Moor talks with three experts on what narrative identity is, what important contributions it makes to the field of personality psychology, and what is needed to further advance research on narrative identity.

#31 Attachment, optimism, and honesty with Bill Chopik

Personality research occupies itself with not only the Big Five traits but a myriad of other important constructs. Bill Chopik talks in this episode about his research on attachment, optimism, and honesty, and also close relationships (including pets). He shares his experience with cross-cultural and lifespan studies, and important lessons from grad school.

#30 Personality states with Gabriella Harari, Kai Horstmann, and Whitney Ringwald

Many researchers like to think of personalities as patterns of dynamic states. Thanks to technological advances, they can now measure the states and build statistical models from these measurements. Other researchers may have remained more sceptical: after all, isn’t personality something relatively stable, by definition? Can state models really help us better understand how people differ from one another in their personality traits? Trying to make sense of this topic, René Mõttus speaks to three experts on the topic: Gabriela Harari, Kai Horstmann and Whitney Ringwald. They discuss what personality states are and how these relate to personality traits, the primary focus of personality research.

#29 Causal inference with Michael Grosz

In this episode, Michael Grosz talks about what causal inference is, how difficult it is to test in personality psychology, and why he doesn't give up on our field.

#28 Big Five vs. HEXACO with Colin DeYoung, Isabel Thielmann, Luke Smillie, and Reinout de Vries

In this episode moderated by Lisanne de Moor, Colin DeYoung, Isabel Thielmann, Luke Smillie, and Reinout de Vries discuss personality traits and trait models, and debate the evidence for and against two of the most dominant trait models: the Big Five and the HEXACO model.

#27 Geography and personality with Fritz Götz, Elisa Militaru, and Markus Jokela

What does geography have to do with personality? In this episode, Rebekka Weidmann speaks with Fritz Götz, Elisa Militaru, and Markus Jokela about studying personality from a geographical psychology approach—what that research field is, how things are measured (and how tricky it is to measure), past interesting findings and future directions.

#26 Spirituality and religiosity with Julie Exline

Julie Exline is an expert in studying spirituality and religiosity. For this episode, Julie talked with Rebekka Weidmann how she came to study spirituality and religiosity, the nature of spiritual struggles, and supernatural operating rules—how people envision or experience God or other supernatural powers.

#25 Behaviour genetics with Michel Nivard

Michel Nivard and René Mõttus discuss classical and modern behaviour genetics, and why much of personality genetics is no longer focused on finding personality genes (there are none) but using genes to learn about environment. Perhaps paradoxically, then, genetics is as likely to help with building psychological and sociological theories of personality as biological theories.

#24 Personality, doomsday prepping, science denial, and being wrong with Adam Fetterman

In this episode, Lisanne de Moor chats with Adam Fetterman about his work on the role of personality and beliefs in shaping people’s behavior in contemporary phenomena such as doomsday prepping, science denial, and people’s willingness to admit to being wrong.

#23 Personality: universalism and cultural context with Moin Syed

Personality psychology is an exciting field of research. However, as we learn in Moin Syed’s presentation, this excitement has been dampened by a hyper focus on methodological and definitional issues based on the history of our field. However, personality can be more. Moin Syed talks in his presentation about how our field can earn back its excitement.