This is the fourth post in a series introducing some of the members of the Signal Patterns Scientific Advisory Board.  These leading psychologists and researchers work with Signal Patterns to bring their work to the public in the form of various mobile and online applications.

David Buss, PhD is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.  Buss is the author of more than 200 scientific articles and has won many awards.   He is the author of a number of publications and books, including The Evolution of Desire, The Dangerous Passion, and most recently, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and The Murderer Next Door, which introduces a new theory of homicide from an evolutionary perspective. He is also the author of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind which is currently in its third edition and was released in 2007 (Wikipedia).

David, what’s your research focus?

Human mating strategies, sexual motivations, personality and sexual strategies, and the evolution of personality.

What are the applications for your work?

There are many POTENTIAL applications of my work on human mating strategies.

What are you reading?

In addition to scientific articles, I enjoy books on travel [Paul Thereaux, for example], and books on true crime.

What are good books for the lay person to understand your area?

The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

and Why Women Have Sex [due out in October]

How is the internet/online applications impacting your work?

My lab does a lot of studies on line these days.  Makes life easier in many ways.

What do you always get asked?  What do your students want to know?

Students want to know what women want in a mate, and why men and women seem to get into so much conflict.

How would you like to bring your work to the public?

Through my books.

What’s the biggest misperception of your field?

That evolutionary psychology is “genetic determinism.”

What’s the ‘holy grail’ for your work?

Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species.”

What’s wrong with psychology?

It is insufficiently infused with the most important theory that unified all of the life sciences–evolution by natural selection.

This is the first post in a series introducing some of the members of the Signal Patterns Scientific Advisory Board. These leading psychologists and researchers work with Signal Patterns to bring their work to the public in the form of various online applications.

Sam Gosling, Ph.D. is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Sam’s environmental research is based on the idea that the spaces in which we live and work are rich with information about what we are like. In turn, we gain valuable lessons for both our personal and professional lives. His work has been widely covered in the media, including The New York Times, Psychology Today, NPR, and “Good Morning America,” and his research is featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.  Sam’s latest book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You was released in May 2008.

Sam, what’s your research focus?

I have three main areas of interest:

(1) How personality is manifested in everyday life (and how we perceive others on the basis of those manifestations). For example, how do people express their goals, attitudes, values, preferences, traits and identity in the places (e.g., bedrooms, offices, Facebook profiles) they craft around themselves? And how do people form impressions of others on the basis of such places?

(2) Personality in non-human animals. Do animals have personality? If so, what traits do they have, how do they develop and how can we measure them?

(3) Internet methods in the social sciences. What are the costs and benefits of using technologies associated with the Internet to examine basic and applied questions in the social sciences?

What are the applications for your work?

Environments
The first area has applications in understanding others, learning how others are perceiving us, marketing, and in the design of spaces at home and at work.

Animals
The second area has numerous applied and theoretical applications. In the applied domain, we can use personality assessments of animals to match shelter dogs to appropriate homes and to identify working dogs (e.g., in explosive detection, border patrol) best suited to their tasks. The work can also be useful in animal welfare (identifying animals suited to different housing conditions) and wildlife management (finding the combinations of animals best suited to re-introduction techniques). From a theoretical standpoint, we can use animal models to understand the genetic, biological and environmental bases of personality.

Internet
The third area is useful because it develops methods for studying questions that were hard to study using conventional methods (e.g., for questions that require very large samples) and for reaching populations that are hard to access with standard procedures (e.g., very rare conditions).

What are you reading now?

“Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places” by Toby Israel

What are good books for the lay person to understand your area of study?

Environments

Um…my book: “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You”

Toby Israel: Some Place Like Home
Dan P. MacAdams: The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self
Richard Florida: The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life

Animals
Hmm…there’s nothing that really gets at it directly but here are a few:
Frans de Waal: Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes
Robert Sapolksy: A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
Stan Coren: Why We Love the Dogs We Do: How to Find the Dog That Matches Your Personality

Internet
Chris Fraley: How to Conduct Behavioral Research over the Internet: A Beginner’s Guide to HTML and CGI/Perl (Methodology In The Social Sciences)

How is the internet/online applications impacting your work?

It’s having a great impact because the Internet is now one of the primary environments in which people express themselves.

What do you always get asked?  What do your students want to know?

- I have an “X” in my living room….what does that mean?

- Let me tell you about my dog/cat…

How would you like to bring your work to the public?

With my book.

What’s the biggest misperception of your field?

That there’s a simple one-to-one relationship between what a person owns and what that person is like.

What’s the ‘holy grail’ for your work?

Understanding how the deepest element of personality–our identity, plays out in everyday life.

What’s wrong with psychology?

A lack of creativity & imagination: Much of the field has become so obsessed with fine tuning methods and statistical techniques that it has taken its eye off the rich psychological behaviors that surround us all.

In my previous post, I discussed some issues surrounding a recent study by Dr. David Schmitt, in which he concluded that in more egalitarian societies, psychological differences inherent to men and women are more dramatic. John Tierney, writing in the New York Times, cites the researcher’s position that in poor countries, the stressful environmental conditions lessen gender differences, since they disproportionately affect the stronger gender.

There is one other major issue with this conclusion, and with using the evidence at hand to corroborate evolutionary theories: the premises that are central to evolutionary psychology are rarely falsifiable.

Let’s say that Schmitt had found that gender differences were lessened in modern, egalitarian societies. Evolutionary psychologists could argue that societal constructs are interfering with the natural gender differences that are evinced in less developed areas. Advertising and media could be said to distort traditional gender roles, enforcing the will of the ruling class. In other words, findings in either direction could be seen as evidence for theories of evolutionary psychology. Karl Popper has put forth a philosophy of science that insists that any scientific theory be falsifiable– that there could be evidence that would refute it. The actual finding of lesser gender differences doesn’t demonstrate the theory to be false– but neither would the opposite set of findings. Either this study doesn’t speak to the issue that it seems to… or this isn’t a true scientific question. While some have argued that evolutionary biology is a science and Popper is incoherent, I’ll just say that these studies are interesting, but that we’re still a long way from understanding what they say about brain development, the impact of social roles, and evolution.

Tierney ends by saying that if Schmitt is right, then “men and women shouldn’t expect to understand each other much better any time soon.” That may make for dramatic copy, but by continuing to investigate these issues, researchers such as Dr. Schmitt– and the Signal Patterns team– are helping everyone understand each other. To say that we don’t understand other genders is to diminish our intellectual capacity; we can comprehend something without being similar. Or, at least the men and women that I know can…

New York Times science columnist John Tierney just posted a piece about psychological differences in men and women, and new research that speaks to whether those differences are innate, or born of societal constructs. Tierney speaks of two camps: the evolutionary psychologists, who believe that gender-based trait differences come from what our ancestors needed to survive. “Social-role psychologists”, on the other hand, believe that societal roles have forged this divergence that finds men to be “more competitive, assertive, reckless, and emotionally flat”, while women tend to be “cooperative, assertive, cautious, and emotionally responsive.”

Research on this subject is tough to come by: while some researchers have come up with creative ways of exploring evolutionary psychology, no one can simulate thousands upon thousands of years of evolution. Tierney summarizes recent findings demonstrating that the size of gender differences in personality varies by culture, but that the variation is not in the direction that we would expect. Tierney calls the former finding bad news for evolutionary psychologists, and the latter– the fact that differences are smaller in traditional cultures– bad news for social-role adherents.

This seems strange to me for two reasons. First, if gender differences are the product of societal expectations, should we really expect traditional societies to show less of a gender gap in personalities? Tierney cites Dr. David Schmitt: “Removing the stresses of traditional agricultural societies could allow men’s, and to a lesser extent women’s, more ‘natural’ personality traits to emerge”; Schmitt proffers that “modern progressive cultures are returning us psychologically to our… roots.” Maybe. Or maybe “modern progressive societies” differ from traditional societies in another way: that they bombard their members with images portraying how men and women should behave.

Estimates of the number of advertisements seen per person per day vary from about 400 to about 3,000, and research shows that these images can elicit stereotype-consistent behavior. So I’m not convinced that our “progressive” societies expose, rather than create, gender differences in personality.

My second concern is about both the role and portrayal of science in the media. When your profession involves searching for the truth– as every good scientist’s should– nothing that brings you closer to your goal should be considered “bad news.” A true scientist believes what the evidence indicates, and doesn’t mold research findings to his or her agenda. This ethos is the reason that all of Signal Patterns’ surveys are tested rigorously– because of our grounding in science, we can’t put out a product that’s scientifically invalid, even if less rigorous testing would allow for a different product or less time to production.

More on Tierney and the gender gap tomorrow…

Personality assessment is based on the “study of individual differences“. But how different are people actually? Well - very different. Old school personality tests provide results in the form of a “type”: You may be a “gentlemen” or a “thoughtful leader”, or a “stressed out couch potato”. These old assessment instruments divide the human population into a small number of “buckets” and tells you what bucket you’re in. The Myers Briggs test, for example, uses 16 different possible personality types. That’s not very unique . Facebook currently has about 70 million active users and MySpace about 200 million. Assuming people are evenly distributed between the 16 types, you and almost 13 million MySpace users are the same type…

The scientific method Signal Patterns uses are “trait based” - they capture what characterizes people based on data collected from a large number of individuals. The Big Five personalty assessment framework captures the degree to which a person exhibits five main dimensions of personality. The Signal Patterns personality survey extends that level of detail to 45 traits, capturing subtle differences even between very similar individuals. It’s a long tail filter into the ocean of people that are online today.

Here is Signal Patterns scientist David Rosen’ take on this: