David C. Funder

Brief Biography

David C. Funder was born in 1953 in Long Beach, California, but grew up in Sacramento.

Funder’s father was a civil servant with the state of California; the family lived in modest financial circumstances.

Upon graduating from high school, Funder first entered a local, two-year community college, transferring to Sacramento State University in his sophomore year. During his first two years of college, he continued to hold down a part-time job at the local grocery store where he had worked at during high school.

In his junior year of college, Funder transferred again, this time to the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained his bachelor’s degree with honors in psychology in 1975. At Berkeley, Funder worked closely with Jacob (“Jack”) Block, who became a close, lifelong friend.

For his graduate work, Funder moved to Stanford University, where he received his PhD in social psychology in 1979. His dissertation advisor at Stanford was Daryl Bem.

Immediately upon earning his doctorate, Funder accepted a job in the psychology department at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.

Three years later, in 1982, he was hired by Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the title of Assistant Professor.

After four years at Harvard, in 1986, Funder moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which awarded him tenure and the title of Associate Professor.

Two years later, in 1988, he left Illinois to join the faculty of the University of California, Riverside. It was a lateral move—he remained an Associate Professor with tenure—but he has stated that he longed to return to his native state.

Funder has spent the rest of his career at UC-Riverside, advancing to the status of full Professor in 1991 and assuming the title of Distinguished Professor in 2007.

As of this writing (2024), Funder remains active as Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside.

Funder has published research in a wide variety of sub-fields of personality psychology, including delay of gratification, the psychological assessment of situations, personality stability, personality as a predictor of behavior, attribution theory, and accuracy of personality judgment.

Funder is particularly well known for his role in developing the Riverside Situational Q-Sort (RSQ). Generally speaking, Q-sorts are assessment instruments for quantifying subjective judgments. As applied to personality judgment, in particular, the RSQ was the first—and for many years the only—empirically validated tool for assessing the psychologically relevant characteristics of situations.

Later on, Funder extended his work on the psychological assessment of situations to encompass extensive cross-cultural research. As principal investigator with the International Situations Project, Funder collaborated with more than 140 psychologists from over 60 countries.

With respect to Funder’s work on the accuracy of personality judgment, it has been said that he single-handedly resurrected this important endeavor from the dead.

Funder has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. He also published several books, notably, The Personality Puzzle (1997; eighth edition 2019), a leading textbook in the field.

Notable Quotes

Note: The original sources of the following quotations attributed here to David C. Funder are provided where known. If no specific source is mentioned, then the attributed quotation may be assumed to derive from or (perhaps via paraphrase) be inspired by Funder’s many academic and popular writings.

Cross-Cultural Research

[I]n a case of international comparisons, we are trying to understand how and why people in different countries act differently in response to maybe the same objective stimulus because they actually experience situations differently.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.

Funder on Funder

Re: Harvey Mudd College:

A: I taught psychology there. I also got asked my favorite question I’ve ever been asked by an undergraduate there. I was lecturing on Freud, actually, to this room mostly filled with engineers . . . and I mentioned the concept of psychic energy, and suddenly they all perked up and one went, “Psychic energy,” he said, “in what units is that measured?”

Q: So, what did you tell him?

A: I said, “It’s a metaphor,” and they all went, “Ughh . . .”

Interview, “Out of the Lab with David Funder,” Society for Personality and Social Psychology, May 31, 2020.

Re: Accuracy of personality judgment

When I started looking at things that affected accuracy of personality judgements, I discovered that the people who were really interested in this topic tended to be personality psychologists. For this reason, I found myself sort of edging into the field of personality, almost accidentally, by following what was originally a social psychological interest in person perception and trying to study what people were actually perceiving.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.

Re: International Situations Project

We currently have a grant proposal pending that we hope to use to expand our International Situations Project to many more countries. The paper that we just got accepted for publication looks at 20 countries (Guillaume et al., in press), which is really not enough if you want to look at country-level variables. We would like to expand it around the world. To the extent that we can capture that, I think that this could help international understanding.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.

Re: Studying statistics

Probably one of the most accidental lucky breaks I have had was that my first statistics course was not in a psychology department, which is where most psychologists take their first and maybe all of their statistics training. All of the psychology statistics courses were full when I was a sophomore, so I had to take mine in the statistics department from a real mathematical statistician.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.

Re: Mentors

My first mentor was Dr. Jack Block, my undergraduate advisor at Berkeley. I did my senior honors thesis with him and stayed in contact for the next 40 years. Then, my second mentor was Dr. Daryl Bem when I went to graduate school. The two of them were both world-class, brilliant individuals and very different from each other, so I sort of got to see two completely different ways to be brilliant, and try to learn by combining and contrasting their two styles. I don’t know any other way you can become a researcher than through mentorship. It is absolutely the most critical thing in anybody’s career to find someone who you are intellectually compatible with, learn from a lot from, and who supports you and helps you out. That’s the only way to have a life in the academic world and possibly in life in general.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.

Life

Life is the process of filling in the details of a story whose ending we already know.

The Personality Puzzle (1997; eighth edition, 2019).

We don’t so much find ourselves as invent ourselves.

The Personality Puzzle (1997; eighth edition, 2019).

Personality

Personality is like an onion. It has multiple layers that can be peeled away to reveal the core, but there is always another layer beneath.

The Personality Puzzle (1997; eighth edition, 2019).

[M]any doors in life are opened or closed to you as a function of how your personality is perceived. Someone who thinks you are cold will not date you, someone who thinks you are uncooperative will not hire you, and someone who thinks you are dishonest will not lend you money. This will be the case regardless of how warm, cooperative, or honest you might really be.

Personality Judgment: A Realistic Approach to Person Perception (1999).

Personality is like a verb. It’s something you do.

“Personality Psychology: A Five-Factor Perspective,” Annual Review of Psychology, 2001, 52: 197–221.

Personality is an individual’s characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms—hidden or not—behind those patterns.

The Personality Puzzle (1997; eighth edition, 2019).

Personality is not just what people have but what they use.

The Personality Puzzle (1997; eighth edition, 2019).

Personality is an engine that sometimes drives people to great things and sometimes drives them off a cliff.

Personality is like an iceberg; only a small part is visible, and much of it lies hidden beneath the surface.

Personality is regarded as a collection of relatively discrete, independent, and narrow social capacities, each relevant to performance only within a specific domain of life.

Personality Psychology

Perhaps the most obvious difference between modern social and personality psychology is that the former is based almost exclusively on experiments, whereas the latter is usually based on correlational studies.

Personality Judgment: A Realistic Approach to Person Perception (1999).

Personality psychologists sometimes reveal an imperfect understanding of the concerns and methods of their social psychological brethren, and they in particular fail to comprehend the way in which so much of the self-report data they gather fails to overcome the skepticism of those trained in other methods. 

Personality Judgment: A Realistic Approach to Person Perception (1999).

[O]ver the past 50 years social psychology has concentrated on the perceptual and cognitive processes of person perceivers, with scant attention to the persons being perceived. Personality psychology has had the reverse orientation, closely examining self-reports of individuals for indications of their personality traits, but rarely examining how these people actually come off in social interaction. . . . [I]ndividuals trained in either social or personality psychology are often more ignorant of the other field than they should be.

Personality Judgment: A Realistic Approach to Person Perception (1999).

The challenge of personality psychology is to understand the person in context.

The Personality Puzzle (1997; eighth edition, 2019).

[W]hy do we have red states and blue states? Why do we have people who disagree so strenuously on so many things where you would think that the data they’re working from ought to be the same? That is the core question of personality psychology. We will never fully answer that question, but chipping away at it is an interesting way to spend your day.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.

I think that any time we understand why people do what they do, we are benefiting society. That’s kind of the whole idea of psychology. In this particular case, we are trying to understand how situations and the way people perceive situations impacts what they do.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.

Person Perception

Studying person perception without studying personality would be like studying vision without knowing anything about color.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.

You need to know something about what’s being perceived as well as the process of perception. You need to know about personality if you want to study person perception.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.

Psychometrics

[A]n astonishing number of research articles currently published in major journals demonstrate a complete innocence of psychometric principles.

Personality Judgment: A Realistic Approach to Person Perception (1999).

Riverside Situational Q-Sort (RSQ)

[The RSQ’s] big strength is that it’s the first attempt that anybody has really made to come up with a measurement instrument for situations. A few people have tried to measure situations in various ways in the past, but they treated coming up with a categorization for situations as the end point. Basically, they wanted to say, “Okay, there are seven different kinds of situations. Now we’re done.” The RSQ tries to move beyond that by saying, “Let’s actually measure real situations and see what we can do with that.” This has been very different because social psychology has been the study of situations for a long time, but it has never tried to assess situations holistically. In other words, there is nothing in social psychology that allows you to, for example, compare three different situations during your day. Which two of those situations are the most similar, and which is the most different? Nothing in social psychology has allowed you to answer that question until the RSQ.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.

[A]fter we were able to access the degree of situational similarity, we were able to rule that out as the only reason that people are consistent over time. In other words, you are consistent in your behavior over your life, over and above what we could explain by saying that you are just in the same situations all of the time.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.

Self-Knowledge

At a very basic level, there is a particularly powerful reason to expect one’s own personality to be particularly difficult to see: It is always there. Kolar, Funder, and Colvin (1996) [D.W. Kolar, D.C. Funder, and C.R. Colvin, “Comparing the Accuracy of Personality Judgments by the Self and Knowledgeable Others,” Journal of Personality, 1996, 64: 311–337—ed.] dubbed this the ‘‘fish and water effect,’’ after the cliché that fish do not know that they are wet because they are always surrounded by water. In a similar fashion, the same personality traits that are most obvious to others might become nearly invisible to ourselves, except under the most unusual circumstances.

Personality Judgment: A Realistic Approach to Person Perception (1999).

Situations

Re: Kurt Lewin’s claim that behavior is determined by the interaction between a person and a situation.

Kurt Lewin never really meant that as an equation, but if you think of it seriously in this way, you can rearrange the terms in two ways. First, you could say that the situation is also a function of the person and the behavior, meaning that the situation could be construed as consisting psychologically of what all people would do in it. Second, you could say that the person is a function of the situation and the behavior. This would indicate that people are essentially what they do in all of the situations of their lives, which is actually not a bad definition of personality.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.

Social Psychology

[S]ocial psychologists are often unfamiliar with basic findings and concepts of personality psychology, misunderstand common statistics such as correlation coefficients and other measures of effect size, and are sometimes breathtakingly ignorant of basic psychometric principles. This is revealed, for example, when social psychologists, assuring themselves that they would not deign to measure any entity so fictitious as a trait, proceed to construct their own self-report scales to measure individual difference constructs called schemas or strategies or construals (never a trait). But they often fail to perform the most elementary analyses to confirm the internal consistency or the convergent and discriminant validity of their new measures, probably because they do not know that they should.

Personality Judgment: A Realistic Approach to Person Perception (1999).

Social psychologists and cognitive behaviorists who overtly eschew any sympathy with the dreaded concept of ‘‘trait’’ freely report the use of self-report assessment instruments of completely unknown and unexamined reliability, convergent validity, or discriminant validity. It is almost as if they believe that as long as the individual difference construct is called a ‘‘strategy,’’ ‘‘schema,’’ or ‘‘implicit theory,’’ then none of these concepts is relevant. But I suspect the real cause of the omission is that many investigators are unfamiliar with these basic concepts, because through no fault of their own they were never taught them.

Personality Judgment: A Realistic Approach to Person Perception (1999).

Statistics

[T]he most important thing for students right now is to get as much training in statistics as they possibly can, and I don’t necessarily mean advanced techniques. Those are all very well and good, but I am really talking about the fundamental theoretical basis of statistics such as the general linear model, the idea of the normal distribution, and other basic stuff that underlies all of the “fancy” techniques.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.

I think there are a lot of debates going on right now in psychology about replication and so forth, which I’m not sure if everybody in the field even follows. I don’t think some people understand the issues very well because they don’t have the basic statistical background to really grasp the arguments that are being made. I think understanding statistics from the ground up is going to be critically important to be at the forefront of the next generation.

Interview with Bradley Cannon, “Comparing Situations with David C. Funder,” Eye on Psi Chi (International Honor Society in Psychology), Spring 2015, 19(3): 18–21.