An Interview with 2016 Diener Mid-Career Award in Personality Recipient Rich Lucas
by Felix Cheung
Congratulations on winning the 2016 Diener Award in Personality Psychology! In what ways did Ed Diener influence your thinking on personality psychology?
Thanks! It's really a great honor to be selected for this award, and I'm especially happy that it was endowed by and named for Carol and Ed Diener. Ed had a tremendous impact on my thinking about personality psychology as well as about the field of psychology more generally, and his influence is especially relevant in today's scientific climate. For one thing, Ed was simply a great advisor. He was genuinely interested in finding out the answer to important questions, and he was really open to whatever that answer would be. So he was (and is) constantly thinking about how we can use innovative methods or unique datasets to answer those questions. This pushed me to improve my skills in measurement and quantitative methods, and this training has definitely influenced the topics I study today. In addition, his openness to the answers we found meant that we were not especially motivated to have a result come out a certain way. Although I didn't realize the importance of this attitude at the time, I think that the recent debates about replicability and research practices have made clear how important this early influence really was.
What is your most exciting discovery?
I guess I'm a little skeptical of any discrete "discoveries" in psychological research as a whole, and especially in my own research. I don't think that's how most psychological research works, and I'm happy to be making incremental contributions to knowledge in some areas I find interesting. To that end, I am proud that we were some of the first psychologists to use panel studies like the German Socio-Economic Panel Study to answer questions about personality and well-being. I'm happy that the use of these studies is pretty common now. I think studies like this can provide strong answers to important questions, but I also like the shift towards psychological research relying on these large, collaborative data-collection efforts. Given our increasing awareness of the problems of small-scale studies, combined with the limited resources that any individual researcher has to conduct large studies, I think that these massive collaborative efforts are the future of psychological research.
Do you have a paper or a line of research that you think is underappreciated (perhaps a paper that you thought was going to make a big impact but didn't)?
That's a great question. I guess if I had to choose one thing, it would be a couple of papers I have that question the role that social relationships play in subjective well-being (some papers I did with former students including Portia Dyrenforth and Ivana Anusic). It's not that I don't believe that social relationships matter, my intuition is that they do. However, I think that most of the evidence that we have for this association is really weak. Specifically, studies that address this question often just look at how self-report measures of well-being correlate with self-reported relationship quality. And when we look beyond this evidence, it's really hard to find strong associations. So my goal with these papers was to point out that as psychologists, we've been too willing to accept weak evidence that social relationships matter (probably because we like the idea so much) and I hope to push for stronger evidence about this effect.
What are the most exciting developments in your research right now?
This will probably sound boring to others, but I am extremely excited that we got funded to spend the last few years working on the measurement of subjective well-being. This allowed us to look really carefully at a bunch of questions that I've been thinking about for many years, including the extent to which famous studies showing mood effects on life satisfaction judgments replicate. So for instance, we looked at the extent to which warm, sunny weather predicts life satisfaction in a sample of a million residents of the U.S. (there was no effect) and we tried to replicate mood effects on life satisfaction judgments in nine different large sample studies (again, with at best, very small effects). We have also been able to test the stability of different types of well-being measures over time, as well as the convergence and relative predictive validity of different methods of assessment. One of the first things that lay people ask about subjective well-being is whether we can really even measure it, so it's nice to have lots and lots of data with which to answer this question.
What is the biggest question left unanswered in personality psychology?
One of the things I like best about personality psychology is that people who work in the field seem to be willing to slowly plug away at basic questions in a way that leads to greater and greater certainty about the effects we identify. For instance, we, as a field, seem to be okay with publishing an additional study on the stability of personality traits, as long as that study contributes to greater certainty about how stable personality traits really are. So looking back on the field, I see a gradual accumulation of better and better evidence about basic issues about the nature of personality. And although we have made great progress on these topics, there is so much more to do. So I think there are huge remaining questions about why people differ from one another and what effects these individual differences have on life outcomes; but I think these are the questions that the field has always struggled to answer.
What are your thoughts on the replication crisis? What practices would you recommend to researchers who would like to improve the replicability of their works?
I think the replication crisis is extremely important and will ultimately be good for the field and for science as a whole. The problems that we are now dealing with have always existed; they are now just finally getting attention they demand. The most exciting aspect of this is that this increased attention has led to new tools for evaluating the strength of evidence that studies can provide, new research on the extent of the problem and the strategies that can be used to prevent problematic practices, and new initiatives to encourage and reward especially strong practices. The speed with which knowledge about the issues has accumulated has been incredibly fast, faster than the accumulation of knowledge about any content area I can think of within psychology. So I think it's a really exciting time to be working in psychology as the field wrestles with these issues.
Do you think academic organizations (like ARP), journal editors, and bloggers can contribute to a more replicable science? What roles do they play?
I think that at this point, there is a role for just about everyone who wants to contribute to a more replicable science. For instance, I'm a member of an NIH Study Section, and my impression is that NIH is taking replicability more seriously and the initiatives that they've implemented are actually making a difference in the way grant applications are evaluated. At the same time, I see many journal editors trying out new policies that are designed to address the issues that they, as individuals, believe are most important. To be sure, not all editors agree, and different editors make different decisions (and of course have different constraints); but that is not a bad thing. We have many different journals trying many different approaches (and, of course, with some doing nothing), which will provide even more data about which strategies have the biggest impact, and which may have unintended consequences. Hopefully, researchers pay attention to the policies that different journals adopt and support those journals with policies that align with their values. This can be done by choosing where to submit, choosing which journals to review for, and even by contacting organizations that sponsor these journals to let them know whether you support the policies the editors adopt. I also strongly believe that bloggers and other social media users have a very important role to play right now. I think that the incredible speed with which things have changed is due in large part to the rapid dissemination of new techniques, new analyses, and new ideas about research practices, and much of this has occurred through these new media.
What advice do you have for personality researchers (particularly early career researchers)?
I think that this question has become especially important as the field struggles with changing ideas about how researchers should be doing their work. In a time of change like this, it seems like it becomes less and less clear what rules to follow to produce good research while also pursuing a successful career. But in reality, it has never been clear or easy, and there was never any guaranteed path to success. I think when I was in graduate school, I had a sense that to have a successful career in psychology you had to check off certain boxes along the way. But I now realize that there are many different ways to make a contribution, and early career researchers have to find a good match between career-related activities that they enjoy and those for which they will be rewarded. So when thinking about which questions to pursue, what types of studies to run, what types of service work to agree to, etc., it is important to remember that there is no single path that guarantees success. My advice is to worry a little less about how each individual decision will affect your career success, as the impact will be difficult to predict. For instance, in relation to current debates about research practices, I often hear people asking whether it is a wise career move to do replication studies. But I think that's the wrong question. Of course you cannot get a job based on replications alone, but you should consider whether doing one or more replications makes sense for the research area you are in and for the broader questions you want to answer. If you consider that question, there is a better chance that you will incorporate replication studies into your research program in a way that enhances your overall contribution to the field.
Twenty years from now, what do you think personality psychology as a field is going to look like?
First, I think that science is slow and that in twenty years, things will probably not look that much different than they are today. However, I expect that current debates about research practices will shape the field in some important ways. I think one of the most difficult things we are currently struggling with is how to address the clear problem of underpowered studies in ways that allow us to tackle interesting questions with limited resources. One important component of this struggle is bringing along people who work at institutions with very limited resources. I think the solution to this problem is pretty clear: The future of personality psychology involves large-scale, collaborative studies that are simply too large to be conducted by individual researchers. Of course, those studies themselves require some large-scale investments; but I've been very encouraged by the attention that personality research has received from scientists in other disciplines. I think that we, as a field, are making a strong case that this investment will pay off, and the inclusion of more and more personality measures in studies like the German Socio-Economic Panel Study is an encouraging sign that people are listening.
In general, how satisfied are you with life? If you could live your life over, would you change anything?
Haha; I think right now I'd score myself an 8.5 on the typical 0-10 scale. It's definitely fluctuated over the years, but things have been pretty good lately. If I had to live my life over, I think I'd go back and tell Ed not to include the item "If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing" from the Satisfaction With Life Scale; it's a pretty terrible item and we'd all be better off if it was never included in the measure.