Member Spotlight: Gregory D. Webster

Gregory D. Webster (Greg) was born in Woodstock, NY, and raised there (until age 8) and in Tulsa, OK (until age 18). He earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees—all in Psychology—from Colorado College, The College of William & Mary, and the University of Colorado Boulder, respectively. After completing a two-year postdoc in quantitative methods at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Greg was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Florida, where he’s currently the R. David Thomas Endowed Professor of Psychology. Greg also serves as an associate editor for Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences.

What led you to choose a career in personality and social psychology?

When I was a student at Colorado College (CC), I took a social psychology taught by sociologist Alvin "Eli" Boderman, which challenged the ways I viewed the social world around me and the impact social movements could have on people’s behavior, and vice versa. I also took a couple of special-topics courses related to social psychology from CC psychologist Tomi-Ann Roberts that I found engrossing. I became interested in personality psychology while earning a terminal master’s degree at The College of William & Mary (W&M), where I took a graduate course in personality taught by Gregory Feist. While attending W&M, John Nezlek and my advisor, Lee Kirkpatrick, were also instrumental in developing my interests in individual differences at the state and trait levels, respectively.

Briefly summarize your current research and any future research interests you plan to pursue.

I’m currently examining personality judgment consensus, accuracy, and assumed similarity in multiple contexts, including traditional zero-acquaintance round-robin designs, and more novel settings where people rate the personality traits of fictional characters. I’m also extending this work by testing the extent to which large language models such as ChatGPT-4 can accurately rate the personality traits of famous people (e.g., politicians, fictional characters) versus the ratings that actual people give the same targets. I’m also actively involved in my grad students’ various projects, most of which examine close romantic relationships.

Why did you join SPSP?

In simple social psychological terms: conformity, compliance, and obedience. ;-) I didn’t know about SPSP until I was a first-year PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder and everyone was getting ready to go to Savannah (2002) for some important conference. The next year, I attended my first SPSP in Universal City (Los Angeles, 2003) and have attended every in-person SPSP since, becoming a devotee of sorts. At first I joined SPSP for the slight conference discount and journal access (by mail, in those days), including the SPSP Dialogue, which was a semiannual society newsletter, which I read cover-to-cover with gusto each time it arrived in my pigeonhole-sized grad student mailbox at Boulder. Chris Crandall and Monica Biernat: If you’re reading this, know that your years of co-editorship at Dialogue helped demystify our little corner of academia for countless grad students seeking a greater understanding of our profession.

What is your most memorable SPSP Annual Convention experience?

Academically, among my best SPSP memories is the symposia I co-organized with my then-PhD student, Benjamin Crosier, titled, “Harvesting and distilling big data in the information age: Applications and advances in social and personality psychology” at the 2013 SPSP in New Orleans. In addition to featuring talks focusing on social networks analysis by the two of us, it featured a talk on online versus offline personality judgments by Lindsay Graham (i.e., Sam Gosling’s former PhD student and current Google UX researcher, not the senior U.S. Senator from South Carolina). Our symposium also featured trailblazing and controversial research by Facebook’s (now Meta’s) Adam Kramer, in which nearly 700,000 Facebook users unwittingly participated in an online experiment that subtly manipulated the emotional valence of the posts that appeared in their newsfeeds. This methodology led to a vigorous discussion of the ethical quandary of subjecting users of platforms to manipulations they may not know about. These are exactly the types of engaging discussions symposiums should strive for. Socially, the 2012 New Orleans SPSP conference was also bittersweet because it marked the fifth and final time I co-organized and co-DJ’ed the annual SPSP afterparty, then called “Lipgloss.” The other Lipgloss dance parties included San Diego (2012), Las Vegas (2010), Tampa (2009), and Albuquerque (2008). The four co-organizers—all current or former Boulder PhD students—put a lot of time and energy into making these large, sometimes 800-person, free events happen. I’ll never forget all the people I met and experiences I shared at these memorable gatherings.

What do you enjoy most about teaching? Do you have a favorite course to teach?

I teach a lot of courses at the University of Florida (UF), most of them graduate courses related to personality and social psychology. My favorite grad course to teach is Research Methods because it forces me to learn new material, procedures, and techniques each time I teach the course. As a methodologist, training and re-training at mid-career is essential, not only to my research and that of my grad students, but also in my roles as an associate editor at PBPB and JPSP. My favorite undergrad course to teach has been this one-credit “(un)common reads” course that UF offers to its honors program students. Each class is capped at 15 students and each instructor chooses a single book to teach that semester. It’s basically a glorified book discussion club, but it forces me to make time to re-read some of my favorite non-fiction books. So far I’ve taught five of these courses, including Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (three times).  

Do you have any advice for individuals who wish to pursue a career in personality and social psychology?

Get as much training in statistics, methodology, data analysis, and modeling as you can. Such training gives you a great deal of flexibility and leverage with regard to job markets, both academic and non-academic. It’s a specialized skill set that relatively few people have, and that scarcity will serve you well.

What career path would you have chosen if you had decided to not pursue psychology?

Once upon a time, I thought I’d pursue a creative career. In both high school and college, I did a lot of theater, music, and musical theater, that included singing in five different groups, appearing in the chorus of two operas, staring in multiple productions, writing and recording my own music, and even winning a playwrighting contest and having my play produced. Of these, I now enjoy writing the most, so I’d likely be writing fiction if I weren’t writing grant proposals and academic articles. Perhaps I should take more time to do both.

Outside of psychology, how do you spend your free time?

I spend much of my free time reading for pleasure, cycling along the Gainesville–Hawthorne trail (38 miles roundtrip from my apartment), and running. My other big passion is travel. Thanks in no small part to academic conferences, I’ve been to all 50 United States, dozens of countries, and five continents (…or six assuming I make it to my political psychology conference in Santiago, Chile today (July 3rd).