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)   Honesty

• Why are people honest in some situations but not others?
• Why are some people more honest than other people?
• To what degree do people truly value honesty (particularly in comparison to other ostensible virtues)?
• How can honesty be measured?
• Other questions!
• I’ve been collaborating with Dr. Eranda Jayawickreme and Dr. Will Fleeson (both WFU Psychology) on this work

2)   Patience (a more recent interest)

• What is patience as a state, trait, and virtue? Are there different types or components of patience?
• What do people think patience is?
• How useful/adaptive is patience?
• Why are people patient in some situations but not others?
• Why are some people generally more patient than other people? Is it even true that there are personality differences in patience? That is, is it even true that “some people are generally more patient that other people”
• How can patience be measured?
• Other questions!
• I’ve been collaborating with Dr. Christian Miller (WFU Philosophy) and Dr. Christian Waugh (WFU Psychology) on this work

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 Nov 2025)

* 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.

*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). A largely univariate framework for understanding multivariate analysis of variance. Psychological Methods.

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

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.

Furr, R. M., Prentice, M., Hawkins, A., Hartley, A. G., & Fleeson, W. (In press).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

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

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

Furr, R. M., Jeong, S. B., Fleenor, J. W., & Shrestha, S. (2024). Evaluating a novel method of scoring multi-rater assessments of leader competencies. Consulting Psychology Journal, 76(4), 348–366. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000285

• Univariate Statistics

• Multivariate Statistics

• Psychometrics

• Introduction to R

• Personality Psychology

• Methods of Psychological Research

• Psychological Testing

• Introductory Psychology