An Interview with 2015 Block Award Winner David Watson
by Andrew Beer
Why are you a personality psychologist?
I actually entered the field not knowing much about it. As an undergrad I didn't take a course in personality, but I had some exposure to it. It seemed to be the kind of field where theory met data, where you could address some of the big questions in a way that wasn't just philosophical. It seemed like an exciting combination. Although I think if I initially understood the field, I wouldn't have gotten into it.
Why?
I started at Minnesota in 1975, during the great person-situation debate, which was a pretty dark time. A lot of people from grad school thought I was crazy for entering a dying and soon-to-be-dead field.
Yet it lives...
Bigger and better than ever!
Have you ever thought about what you would be doing if you weren't a research psychologist?
Yes. Probably not anything radically different. I was torn between applying to graduate school and applying to law school, but I burned out on the application process before I got to the law schools. Every once in a while I wonder what would have happened had I gone to law school. I asked a friend of mine who became a lawyer and he said, "You'd probably become a law professor."
Tell me about a discouraging thing that happened early in your career and how you managed it.
There were plenty. I would say my career path was initially pretty uncertain. My first forays onto the job market were met with only a few nibbles. Luckily, I married well and Lee Anna (Clark) got a job at SMU, where something eventually opened up for me. Still, there were times when I was not convinced that I would ever get a full time faculty position. But after I started at SMU, things started happening pretty fast, so I didn't have a lot of time to dwell on that.
Did anything help you keep your spirits up during the dark times?
Early on, if you look at my publications, I had an unusual profile. I had three papers in Psych Bulletin within three years of my PhD (and only one in JPSP). So people initially saw me more as a scholar/reviewer and not as an empiricist, but I also got a lot of positive feedback on these papers, which helped me maintain my interest and feel like I was doing something of value.
What's something you learned from a colleague that changed you or your approach to your work?
I started as project coordinator on a grant Jamie Pennebaker had, and shared an office with him for a year. His approach to science was really interesting and different than any I had ever seen, and one of the things I really respected about him was that he was not afraid of failure. He would develop an idea about something and pursue it, and during the time I was there he seemed to have a number of what initially appeared to be dead-ends. But he was absolutely fearless--and creative. I'm not sure I've ever had that level of riskiness, but I have always respected that and tried to emulate it to some extent.
I know that you frequently have a pretty full lab but manage to provide a high quality mentoring experience to all involved. Do you have advice for those mentoring or seeking to mentor many students simultaneously? Or mentoring advice in general? What's your secret?
I'm not sure my approach works for everyone, but it works for me because I'm interested in a lot of stuff and have never pursued a path where I'm only doing one thing. So I've really enjoyed having a number of different students at the same time and allowing them to develop their own interests. That has really pushed me in different directions and keep my viewpoint fresh and creative. For example, the work we do in psychopathology: some students are really interested in depression, some in obsessive-compulsive disorder, some are into sleep disorders, and you look back and think, "Wow, we've done a lot different things here." This influences the way we see the lab. At Notre Dame, the lab is very much personality and psychopathology, but there are no boundaries. This creates a framework wherein people can carve out their own territory. At Iowa, I was working with both clinical and personality students, and there was a lot of overlap and integration between them. That was a very exciting and intellectually stimulating time. I've found I'm the kind of person who gets bored doing the same thing, so being able to go off in different directions is really neat.
Do you have a finding or line of research that seems to excite you more than it excites others (as could be seen in citation count or the like)?
There are probably a couple of things that fall into this category. The stuff we've done with zero acquaintance ratings has become a popular area, but when I first started working on it, I just so mesmerized by it, so dumbfounded by the strength of the correlations we were getting; it was incredible. Since then, some of the things we've done in person perception, where we look at highly correlated measures and one of them will show a self-peer agreement correlation of .60 and the other will show a correlation of .35-other people don't seem as blown away by that as I am.
The other area I keep coming back to is what we're now calling anomalous sleep experiences: hypnogogic hallucinations and the like.
The "dissociations of the night" stuff...
Yes, that's an area I'd have to say I pretty much founded. As far as I can tell there are maybe three or four lab groups in the world that work on this. So it's never really caught on as a huge deal, but I continue to find it very interesting.
With what area of research do you secretly want to be involved?
Probably because of teaching my graduate assessment course, the area I find really interesting in which I've done nothing would be ability testing, intelligence, some of the high stakes applications of that. Because I teach, I am a consumer of this information, but I've never been actively involved in it. We've done very little intelligence-related work in my lab. So that's something I look at and say, "That would be really cool."
I've done a lot of different things, but probably the only wish I have now is that I would be young enough to embark on another 15-20 year longitudinal project, which no longer seems very feasible. Other things that people are doing now, like neuroscience, I'm fairly comfortable that I'm not working in those areas.
What do personality psychologists not know that surprises you?
There are a few things. One thing that's always stimulated by teaching the assessment class is the extent to which personality tests show some kind of item or test bias. It always surprises me-and I throw this out to the students-that traditionally if you look at a lot of test manuals, like the NEO, they have both general and sex-specific norms. Which ones should we be using? I think we've sort of settled on it not mattering, but in ability testing it's a real issue.
There's a lot we don't know. I think we think we know a lot. One of the things that's changed the most since I've been in the field is that we tend to talk the same language more now, which is really good. I'm old enough that I remember, at Minnesota we were trained in the MPQ, the Berkeley people used the CPI, and everyone had different labels for things. Now we can talk about Conscientiousness or Neuroticism and know what those things are. But we only kind of/sort of know this. It's important not to get jaded and think we've really got a firm handle on the specifics because I don't think we do. But we're getting there.
I've encountered some of this murkiness recently in trying to connect some paper and pencil measures with daily behaviors...
The point about behavior is well-taken. Back in the 70s, there was all this focus on how traits relate to behavior, and it's difficult to study behavior. In some ways, we've bypassed it, which is a good thing. We study things like GPA; we know that C predicts grades and how well you do in school. That's an important outcome—probably much more important than what people were looking at in the 70s and 80s—but it's still an interesting question: how do these dispositional dimensions that we're measuring translate into the day-to-day lives of people? You can use ecological momentary assessment to get at some aspects of this, but the actual behavior is still kind of murky.
What's your proudest moment?
I don't know about proudest, but I remember taking a job candidate to dinner with Jamie (Pennebaker) and the candidate asked what we were proudest of or most invested in, and almost in the same breath we both said "whatever we're currently working on." But probably the most excited I ever was was back at SMU—back when you ran things on a computer and it generated printouts—the stranger ratings study. I had been plotting this study for 10 years, so it was a big deal to me. And when I first ran the correlations and saw the correlation for Extraversion and realized it was a moderate correlation, that was very cool.
Any final thoughts?
As the years go by, what really motivates me most and keeps me most interested are things that violate my expectations. I think like most people, I have pretty good defense mechanisms. When I'm looking through results, I probably filter them through a strong confirmatory bias where I see what I expect to see. But every once in a while I break through that and say, "Why the heck is this?" Like we talked earlier about agreement correlations: you begin to look at this, and it doesn't make any sense. So the things I'm most interested in now are the things that I look at that don't make any sense to me.