Hogan is pleased to introduce the Science of Personality Institute (SPI), an innovative extension of the Hogan brand. Personality psychologist David Condon, PhD, has been named the director of the institute. The Science of Personality Institute holds two goals: to advance how we understand personality as a scientific discipline and to help that understanding reach people who can use it.
Condon spoke about the institute on episode 154 of The Science of Personality podcast. He discussed what the SPI aims to accomplish, the importance of personality science, and current and future research priorities.
What Is the Science of Personality Institute?
The SPI is a personality research institute that will emphasize applied science. Its goal is to advance personality psychology as a field and share findings with a broader audience. “We’re focused on helping people understand how important personality is,” Condon said. “Most of the world doesn’t understand how deeply embedded the effects of personality are in everything we do.”
While personality is not often explicitly studied outside of academia, overlap nevertheless exists in many fields. From computer science to marketing to economics to health services and beyond, anywhere someone studies how individual differences affect outcomes, they are studying personality (whether they use that term or not). A major goal of the SPI is to bring people together for multidisciplinary cooperation.
“I want the SPI to become a model for what serious personality science can look like outside of the university,” Condon said. The SPI differs from both academic laboratories and R&D departments. Academic research is driven by publishing and teaching, and commercial organizations are driven by competition and market forces. But the SPI balances objective research and applied data to foster rich collaboration across contexts, publish rigorously, and bring scientific findings into real-world practice.
Why Research Personality?
One essential challenge in researching personality is defining it. Researchers haven't reached a consensus on the definition of personality, even though it affects everything from our smallest decisions to our most consequential ones.
Ask Condon to define personality, and the answer depends on how much detail you want. Within Hogan, he works from a two-part framework: identity, how you see yourself from the inside, and reputation, how the people around you would describe you. Reputation is the observable, measurable part. Reputation allows us to predict performance outcomes.
Many academic researchers use a different definition instead: personality is the stable pattern of how people differ in affect, behavior, cognition, and desire. Condon finds it accurate but "a little hollow" because it is "more of a grouping of the aspects of personality than a definition of what personality actually is."
His own thinking has moved somewhere more speculative. He compares personality's structure to the vectors that emerge from machine learning models: "highly complex, hard to interpret, and arguably inscrutable ... interactions of thousands of variables that collectively shape how each of us responds to the situations we face in everyday life." It's an unfinished idea, by his own admission, but one that reflects his perspective for research.
And when he's talking to someone outside the field, he simplifies further: personality, he says, describes "the psychological ways that people differ."
The range of all of these definitions is wide. Researchers largely agree personality matters enormously; they just don't agree on how to define it. Closing that gap is part of what the SPI exists to do.
Goals and Priorities of the SPI
In establishing a new institute, mission, people, and strategy are all key. Condon said he will implement specific short-term strategies that will broaden over time. “We intend to build from a foundation of success,” he said. “I’m walking into an organization that has a history of strong research publications and dissemination through Hogan Press.”
He acknowledged that collaboration with internal and external researchers and practitioners is a priority for the SPI. “Collaboration is not a nice-to-have. It is critical,” Condon said. His vision is to bring together people whose work may not normally overlap but who share a passion and interest in personality research. He praised collaborative work for being better informed, more energetic, more focused, and of higher quality than siloed work.
These goals align closely with the core tenets of Hogan Assessments. Ryne Sherman, PhD, chief science officer, observed that the SPI follows on the lifelong mission of Robert Hogan, PhD, founder and president, to further the field of personality research: “Dr. Hogan’s primary driver was never about the business. The primary driver has always been about the mission around personality psychology.”
“This opportunity sits between rigorous science and application—whether any of that science helps people live better lives,” Condon said. “To walk the line between the two is very exciting.”