An Interview
We sat down with David Hughes during ECP20 to discuss the three talks his team presented, the future of personality science, his love of football and more!
David is a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at the Alliance Manchester Business School (University of Manchester).
Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what made you become interested in personality psychology?
Technically, I’m an Organisational Psychologist at The University of Manchester. But personality is my first and only true love from a research perspective!
My first major foray into personality was my PhD, which examined impulsivity-related traits in relation to financial mismanagement including problematic credit use, debt, and insurance fraud. I chose this topic because I grew up in an area that wasn’t particularly affluent. People had it tough because of economic conditions, and also struggled to manage what little money they had, buying nice but unnecessary items and, often running out of money before the next paycheque. Sometimes unfortunately this meant they would have to forgo food or were unable to replace broken shoes for their children. I was baffled and saddened as to why this happened. It wasn’t a lack of understanding, rather something within people that made it difficult to regulate their immediate impulses for future benefit. That ultimately evolved into a general interest in what I would call regulatory behaviours concerning self-control or broadly trying to fit yourself to environmental demands.
The other reason I love personality is I’ve always been interested in describing people accurately. We all do this a lot, ‘this person is funny’; ‘this person is kind’, or ‘avoid that person because they've taken advantage of others’. Describing people, accurately, is really important for a host of social activities. But it has to be accurate description, and accuracy is why I tend to value facets more than multi-dimensional broad domains.
Q: Can you tell us what brings you to ECP20?
ECP is, without a doubt, my favourite conference! There's something about the culture, the vibe, whatever you want to call it. I actually just tweeted about a keynote saying, “culture comes from people”. There's something about ECP goers that creates cool culture. So, purely selfishly, I came to have a nice time and learn from cool people. More pragmatically, why did my university pay for me to attend? The answer is three different papers that my team and I are presenting.
First is the culmination of about 8-10 years of work, between Paul Irwing, Tom Booth, Alexander Tokarev, and myself,designed to make meaningful strides towards the development of a comprehensive taxonomy of personality facets. In Study 1, we factor analysed 1,772 unique personality items derived from many of the major omnibus inventories (e.g., NEO, HEXACO etc.) to identify a base set of facets. In Study 2, we conducted a systematic search of the literature to find anything missing from the base set – we reviewed about 700 additional facets at the item level, which is important to avoid Jingle-Jangle problems. The culmination of Studies 1 and 2 were 77 ostensibly unique facets. In Study 3, we developed new items for all facets, assessed them using CFA and conducted numerous, rigorous tests of discriminant validity to ensure we avoided construct proliferation. The culmination was 71 personality facet scales that are open-access, psychometrically robust, unidimensional, and discriminant. We call this the Facet MAP (Multidimensional Assessment of Personality). It has variants of all facets from all widely used personality measures. Our ultimate hope is that the Facet MAP will continue to develop and eventually facilitate a comprehensive taxonomy of personality facets.
Second –also psychometric scale development, a common theme throughout my work– is work led by one of my PhD students, John Martindale. He has taken measures of Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism, the putative dark triad, built from the NEO-PI-R facets. Because these measures of the Dark Triad (psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism) were developed independently, the three broad multi-dimensional traits overlap a lot at the facet-level. John has taken the independent measures and tried to get rid of redundancy, to produce a single set of facets that can assess all three traits. The result is improved psychometric properties, reduced redundancy, much shorter scales, and even improved prediction. He just presented that work and did a fantastic job.
Third, another of my PhD students, Artjom Rushanov, presented on occupational personality profiles. A common assumption in many theories, lay and scientific, is that different occupations have different characters: ‘librarians are quiet’; ‘lawyers are argumentative’; ‘academics are open-to-experience and don’t reply to emails!’. For example, Brent Roberts’ ASTMA model, suggests that personality shapes who is Attracted to and Selected by an organisation, and when in role, personality is developed by Transformation and Manipulation mechanisms, after which if people don't ‘fit’, they tend to leave (Attrition). If accurate, these ASTMA mechanisms should produce relatively homogeneous occupational groups. But when you look, there's very little good quality evidence for occupation-specific personality profiles. Artjom showed that when you look at the Big Five, there aren’t many differences between occupations, but you get some really interesting differences between jobs when you look at facets. Artjom also showed that job and situational characteristics were correlated with personality (click here for the slides). This work tells us that occupational personality profiles do exist and you can assess them when using nuanced measures. And the correlations between characteristics and traits gives us a steer to examine exactly how/why these profiles emerge.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about the scholars and researchers that have inspired you and your work?
Yeah, sure! First shout-out is for my PhD supervisor Paul Irwing. He prioritises rigour above all else and he’s a fan of what I call slow science. Producing large, multi-study papers that address each other’s limitations. Paul holds the view that one or two papers that do a good job are preferable to 6 small weaker papers. That's definitely a model I've taken throughout my career. I admire Timothy Judge and Brent Roberts for similar reasons. They’re great examples of how to do serious individuals differences research.
A second inspiration is Ian Deary. His legacy via those he has hired and developed, is probably unparalleled. Look across ECP and you can see the effects of Ian’s lab all over the place. I like to think that science is a collective endeavour. A team sport. Ian’s approach embodies that better than anyone I know of.
Third, is not a personality researcher. John Antonakis is professor of leadership at the University of Lausanne. His dedication to rigorous research, enthusiasm, and charisma are inspiring. He’s had a huge impact on the leadership field. This is a flawed metric, but as an example, since he’s been in charge of The Leadership Quarterly, the impact factor has risen from around 4 to 10 and almost every single paper is of the highest levels of rigour. That definitely wasn’t the case before his tenure!
Q: Where do you see the field in the next 10 years?
Oh, you’re coming at me with the easy ones now! I think there’s no moving away from the ‘dynamic’ approach to personality – looking at personality and its fluctuations in conjunction with trait stability. This covers both long-term change and shorter-term fluctuations. Maybe 20 years from now when people say “personality” they won't immediately think of relatively static traits. And honestly from a marketing perspective for us as a field that would be super useful because not every conversation would have to address the question: “what's the point of measuring personality if you can't change it?”. Because yeah, you can. And even if you can’t change the underlying traits, you can certainly develop characteristic adaptations (or whatever phrase you want to put on those more malleable bits).
The second and maybe this is just from my biased perspective is fine grained measurement. We see this in the Facet MAP I mentioned above, the nuances work led by René Mõttus, the SAPA project led by David Condon, etc. The Big Five have been an incredibly useful and important framework and will continue to be, but the level of the Big 5/6/whatever simply doesn’t give rich enough descriptions of people’s character. This issue used to be controversial, but now it is mainstream and our field will benefit immensely from more fine-grained measurement.
Q: What advice would you give younger researchers?
My first piece of advice is to be wary of people’s advice! Good advice is personalised and context specific, rarely does general advice hold across diverse circumstances. Now, ignore that bit of advice for a minute or two…
· Learn as many methods of data collection and data analysis as you can! These are the tools that will serve you throughout your career, whether in academia or not.
· Find research topics that interest you. If you have a fundamental passion that you want to work on for a decade or more, then great, do that. If not, be micro-ambitious, work on things that interest you now, knowing your interests will develop over time.
· Work hard, or work smart, as defined by your own individual differences. Some people work 60-hour weeks, and never tire. Others work 30-hour weeks. Both models result in successful academic careers if applied consistently. Find the most efficient and sustainable working model for you and then do it! Overwork, high-volume low-quality papers, excess stress, and burnout are all counterproductive.
· Celebrate paper submissions. Acceptances are, of course, what really matter, but they are quite rare, especially at the start of your career, and by the time your paper’s accepted you’ll be bored of it and well on to the next thing! So, raise a glass, or however you celebrate, to submissions (you can always celebrate the acceptance, too!).
· Academia is a team game, and is becoming more so. Reach out and make connections with researchers in your area from other institutions. Academics are, generally, receptive to such messages. I have no doubt you will meet friends and collaborators that will enhance your life and career.
· Social media is great, but be wary. Twitter would have you variously believe that academia is a rose garden or hell fire. Neither is true. Academia is an industry, like many others, being an academic is a job, like many others. There are pros and cons, and there are better and worse Universities to work for. It is competitive, like many other industries and thus ‘making it’ can be hard and involve some luck. But anything worth achieving in life is hard. So, if research excites you then it is worth giving it your best shot.
· No matter what stage of career you’re at, remember what it was like to be a student/early career researcher (e.g., not knowing whether you will ‘make it’, job insecurity, not knowing the hidden rules of the game) and treat people accordingly.
· Be humble. Don’t name your theory after yourself!
· Be compassionate. We are all working to find out fundamental truths about people and their lives. Nothing about this business needs to be aggressive. Sometimes, the quest for rigour can morph into antagonism, but that is a choice, there is no need for this to happen. We academics are really good at criticism, it’s a core part of our job. But we should also offer celebration, reach out when you read a paper that you like or see a talk that excites you. A quick e-mail of praise goes a long way.
Q: What do you like to do outside of work?
I have two major hobbies. One, almost on par with my love of personality is football (soccer). I absolutely love football! I had aspirations of doing football as a profession but once I realised I wasn’t good enough, I thought: if you can’t score all the goals maybe you could manage/coach those who do score all the goals! So, I chose to study psychology and discovered I was really nerdy and that sports psychology just wasn’t rigorous enough for me. So, I shifted to Organisational Psychology where I found rigorous research on motivation, team building, leadership, etc. I support a team called Wigan Athletic. They won the FA Cup in 2014. That's the end of their list of successes! I also still play and coach a team, Birchfields Phoenix F.C., even at the grand old age of 36! We won the title last year as well!
My second passion is music, in particular guitar. My best friend, whose name is also David, taught me how to play and we played in bands together for years when we were in same geographical area. I'm actually teaching Paul Irwing to play and even wrote and ‘performed’ an exploratory factor analysis song for my students during COVID-19 online teaching! My poor students! There we have it, football and guitar are my two passions outside of work. And family. I love my family. They're great and have supported me throughout whatever dubious achievements I've made thus far.