Mike Furr

I am generally interested in personality, moral psychology, psychological measurement, and methodology.

Within those general themes, I have been focusing recently on these three main topics:

1)   Behavioral Prediction – Human and AI

• How accurate are people, when they try to predict behavior?
• How accurate is Artificial Intelligence, when it tries to predict (human) behavior?
• Can people predict their own behavior, the behavior of people like them, or the behavioral of “the typical person”?
• Are some people better at predicting behavior than others? If so, why?
• How do people (and AI) form behavioral predictions?
• Can peoples’ ability to predict behavior be enhanced?

2)   Patience and Honesty

• Why are people patient in some situations but not others? Why are they honest at sometimes but not other times?
• What do people think patience is?
• How useful/adaptive is patience?
• To what degree do people truly value honesty and patience (particularly in comparison to other ostensible virtues)?
• How are patience and honesty related to diverse personality traits?
• How does personality interact with situational forces to drive honesty and patience?

3)   Analysis and Measurement

• Psychometrics
• Scale development (e.g., development of measures of patience and of truthful communication)
• Scale validation (e.g., the use of generative artificial intelligence in scale validation)
• Data analysis (e.g., a relatively intuitive perspective for understanding Multivariate ANOVA)

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Recent Representative Publications (updated Sept 2026)

* Student co-author

*Austin, K. D., *Crawley, H. K., Fleeson, W., & Furr, R. M. (In press). Using generative artificial intelligence to advance hypothesis-driven scale validation: Identifying criterion measures and generating precise a priori hypotheses. Assessment. https://doi.org/10.1177/10731911251401321

*Crawley, H. K., Jayawickreme, E., & Furr, R. M. (In press). Moral character: A personality perspective on morality. In D. Lapsley & J. Gibbs (Eds.) Research Handbook on Lifespan Moral Development. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Furr, R. M. (In press). Psychometric methods. In G. M. Breakwell & D. B. Wright (Eds.), Research Methods in Psychology (6^th ed). Sage publications.

*Lam, H., Balkaya-Ince, M., Cole, V., Ratchford, J., DeVotta, N., Gulliford, L., Kurts, L. Lewis, V. A., Manokara, K., Schnitker, S., Snow, N. Turnquest, E., Van Cappellan, P., Furr, R. M., & Jayawickreme, E., (In press). Reflections on covenantal pluralism as a psychological construct: Relational engagement across religious differences. The Review of Faith & International Affairs. https://doi.org/10.1080/15570274.2026.2715850

Reynolds, C. J., Jayawickreme, E., *Wheat, R., Stokes, E., *Santos, C., Fleeson, W., & Furr, R.M. (In press). Honesty as truthfulness: New trait and state measures of truthfulness to advance research and theorizing on when and why people are honest. European Journal of Personality. https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070251338199

Furr, R. M., Miller, C. B., *Cole, J., *Li, J., *Porth, A., & *Good, R. (In press). What is Patience? Insights Emerging from an Integration of Philosophy and Psychology. In S. Schnitker & M. Pianalto (eds.), The Virtue of Patience. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197779477.003.0004

Furr, R. M. (2026). A largely univariate framework for understanding multivariate analysis of variance. Psychological Methods. https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000819

Furr, R. M., Prentice, M., Hawkins, A., Hartley, A. G., & Fleeson, W. (2026).Is doing good good enough? A motivation, action, sacrifice, and temptation (MAST) view of moral praiseworthiness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672241273243

Furr, R. M., Waugh, C. E., *Good, R. N., *Ye, C., *Li, J., Miller, C. B., *Cole, J., & *Porth, A. (2026). Patience and patience regulation: Development and psychometric evaluation of complementary scales with alternate forms. Journal of Personality Assessment, 108(5), 715-730. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2026.2621759

Miller, C. B., & Furr, R. M. (2025). Patience: A new account of a neglected virtue. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 11(1), 97-117. https://doi.org//10.1017/apa.2024.5  Reynolds, C. J., Stokes, E., Jayawickreme, E., & Furr, R. M. (2025). Truthfulness predominates in Americans’ concepts of honesty: A prototype analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 51(4), 573–595. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672231195355

• Univariate Statistics

• Multivariate Statistics

• Psychometrics

• Introduction to R

• Personality Psychology

• Methods of Psychological Research

• Psychological Testing / Research in Psychological Assessment

• Introductory Psychology