what we study

combining training in basic personality science with experience in applied settings

structure

How can we capture the ways in which people differ? How do our measurement tools influence our ability to predict behavior? What is personality?

development

How does personality change over time? What influences personality?

health

How is personality related to health outcomes? How can personality help us understand how people manage their own health?

At the heart of our research are basic questions: what is personality? How should we measure personality? How does personality change? How does personality affect the trajectory of one’s life?

Sometimes we ask these questions directly. Sometimes we situate our research in applied settings, primarily health and healthcare.

Our strength lies in the combination of a data-driven measurement-approach and a developmental approach to the influences on and of personality. Members of our lab have or will learn expertise in factor analysis, item-response theory, structural equation modeling, hierarchical linear modeling, and machine learning. We explore existing longitudinal datasets while also collecting large-scale datasets which represent both populations of people and the item-space of individual differences.

We value open science, and so we strive for transparency in all aspects of our research. For that reason, you’ll find us preregistering studies, posting data that we own, sharing analytic scripts, publishing preprints, and using and teaching with open software as much as possible.

Join our team

Undergraduates at the University of Oregon interested in working as research assistants can apply using the link here. Please note that we generally only look at responses twice a term. 

Collaborators, past-members, and friends of the lab

William Revelle

Joshua Jackson

Daniel Mroczek

Patrick Hill

Eileen Graham

René Mõttus

Dustin Wood

Joshua Wilt

Joe Gladstone

Cooling on the rack

News from and recent activity in the PIE lab