Mike Furr: Most people are actually "quite good at figuring out how others see them."
Here's looking at you
Psychologist studies how you think other people see you — and what they really think about you
By Kim McGrath
Office of Creative Services
Associate Professor of Psychology Mike Furr studies personality and teaches undergraduate courses on personality psychology, psychological testing and methods of psychological research, and graduate courses in univariate and multivariate statistics.
What topics do your students find most interesting?
Most students are more intrinsically interested in personality psychology. Research methods and statistics courses may not be as intuitively appealing, but they are among the most important courses taught in psychology because they deepen students' abilities to think critically.
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Do undergraduate psychology majors have opportunities to conduct research?
Absolutely. Our curriculum strongly emphasizes research skills, and we encourage students to take advantage of research opportunities. Not all students do, of course, but those that do have a huge advantage in terms of "hands-on" learning of important skills and getting into graduate school (or law school, business school, medical school, etc). Our undergraduate students who go to grad school have had great success in getting accepted and performing very successfully.
Is it important that students conduct research in areas related to their career goals?
It's nice when students work with professors who share their interests, but I'd say it's really the experience with the process of doing research that is most important. Students who participate in research not only have highly relevant experience for grad school applications, but they also get to know their professors better. This makes it easier for the professor to comment on the student's work in a much more personal way for letters of recommendation.
What research are you working on now?
I am currently writing a paper with a former graduate student, Erika Carlson (MA '08), that reports her master's thesis. We studied "meta-accuracy" in personality judgment, and we'll soon submit the paper to a top journal in psychology.
What is meta-accuracy in personality judgment?
A "meta-perception" is your perception of what I think of you. For example, do you think that I see you as friendly, responsible, interesting, smart and so on? By extension, "meta-accuracy" is the accuracy of your meta-perceptions — whether you have an accurate perception of what I think of you. For example, some people may have a fairly accurate understanding of how they're seen by their friends and acquaintances, whereas other people seem to be oblivious.
How do you determine how others see you? Previous research seems to indicate that people are really bad at this. However, for Erika's thesis, we designed a study to reexamine this research, and we adopted a different type of research procedure. Erika and I believe that our study is a reasonable and fair test of people's ability to judge how others perceive them.
Testing a person's ability to determine what others think of them sounds difficult.
We recruited a group of about 100 student participants from introductory psychology courses, and we asked them to think of up to six people from their real lives — parents, hometown friends, college friends, two acquaintances or "informants" from each category. Then we had each participant record how they thought they were perceived by each of these six people. We used a personality questionnaire with 30 traits so the participants recorded the way they thought each of the six people they listed would rate them on the same traits. For example, does Mary think her friend from high school perceives her as talkative, shy, emotional, etc. These are the students' "meta-perceptions."
Erika then contacted each of the potential informants through e-mail and directed them to a Web site with the same questionnaire that the student participants completed. At this point, Mary's friend would actually record how she perceives Mary. So, these are the "actual perceptions." We were then able to statistically compare students' meta-perceptions (how the students think they're seen by their six informants) to their informants' actual perceptions (how the informants actually do see the students). Kari Heuer, an undergraduate student who we were lucky to have working on our team, was very helpful in getting this project completed.
How was this study different from past personality judgment research?
The main difference is that the informants in our study came from different social domains of people's lives (recall that we obtained ratings from parents, hometown friends and college friends). Thus, the informants might have seen the students in very different kinds of situations, doing different kinds of things, expressing different facets of their personalities, and therefore, the informants from different social domains might really have meaningfully different impressions of the student participants. Thus, when we analyze the data to see if a participant accurately understands or detects the different ways that he or she is seen by the six informants, there are probably real differences for the student to detect.
Were you able to determine how successful we are at being able to know what people think of us?
In contrast to prevailing conclusion in the field, our evidence shows that people are in fact quite good at figuring out how others see them. It shows that people are good at detecting and understanding the differences in other people's impressions of them. I think that Erika's thesis, once it's published, is really going to change the way that many social and personality psychologists think about this important facet of peoples' social lives and social skills.
