How my research has evolved

Measuring people (1992–2000)

I began as a psychometrician. In 1992 I joined London Guildhall University, and in the same year I was a co-author, with Hans Eysenck, Paul Barrett and Glenn Wilson, of the paper that set out how to measure the 21 traits of the Eysenck Personality Profiler. Much of my work in that decade asked plain questions about measurement. Can an interviewer judge personal qualities? Do people fake personality tests? Is the halo effect in ratings always an error? I studied motorcyclists, physicists and sales staff. In 1997 I moved to the University of Surrey. With Adrian Furnham and colleagues I examined the structure of the Eysenck Personality Profiler (British Journal of Psychology, 2000) and found that a short form of nine scales fitted Eysenck’s three factors better than the full version did.

Gray’s theory meets work (2001–2005)

In 2000 I moved to The University of Queensland. Jeffrey Gray had proposed that personality reflects sensitivity to reward and to punishment, and I asked whether that explained behaviour at work better than Eysenck’s model. I compared the two in predicting work motivation (2001), mapped Gray’s model onto the Eysenck Personality Profiler (2002) and wrote a psychometric critique of the scales then used to test the theory (2003). With Luke Smillie I developed the Appetitive Motivation Scale (2004), which treats the approach system as sensitivity to reward.

A model of learning in personality (2005–2012)

In 2005 I proposed the hybrid model of learning in personality. In the model, a biological drive does not decide what a person becomes; learning does. Sensation seeking is a drive to explore, and goals, planning, deep understanding and rational thinking can redirect it. Peter O’Connor and I tested the model in “Learning to be saints or sinners” (Journal of Personality, 2008). With Luke Smillie and Alan Pickering I reviewed the revised version of Gray’s theory (Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2006), and in 2009 I published the Jackson-5 scales to measure it. I moved to UNSW as a professor in 2008.

Divergence and leadership (2012–2017)

I was Head of the School of Management at UNSW from 2012 to 2015. In those years my research turned to people who diverge from the norm. Elliroma Gardiner and I studied workplace mavericks (British Journal of Psychology, 2012). Michael Collins and I proposed a process model of how self-regulation separates constructive from destructive leadership (The Leadership Quarterly, 2015). Ben Walker and I reviewed moral emotions and corporate psychopathy (Journal of Business Ethics, 2017). In 2017 five of us brought the strands together in Psychological Bulletin, combining Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory with a model of attention.

Evidence, strategy and big questions (2017–present)

Since then I have worked more closely with colleagues in strategy and management. An ARC Linkage project with Steven Lui, George Shinkle and Salih Ozdemir studied innovation in Australian mid-market firms. With Christian Criado-Perez and Catherine Collins I have studied when managers use evidence and when they ignore it (Applied Psychology, 2024). I have also taken on some larger questions: whether leadership theory has advanced on the Roman idea of gravitas (2020), what survivalists are like (2018), and whether theories of civilisation collapse explain the Fermi paradox (Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2024). I am currently President of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences.