David C. Funder

Career After earning his PhD, Funder joined the faculty at Harvey Mudd College, where he taught for three years. He then moved to Harvard University as an assistant professor in 1982, and to University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1986 as an associate professor. In 1989, he returned to California to teach at University of California, Riverside, where he was promoted to full professor in 1991. He served as the department chair of the psychology department from 2002 to 2006 and was made a Distinguished Professor in 2007.

Funder is the creator of the Riverside Situational Q-Sort (RSQ), wherein participants rank 90 items based on whether they are characteristic of a given situation. These items include "talking is permitted", "situation is complex", "a job needs to be done", and "situation may cause feelings of hostility." Three findings from trials using RSQ include that "situations a person experiences over time are more similar to each other than they are to the situations that someone else experiences and vice versa, which is part of the reason why people’s behavior is consistent over their lives;" experiences were described similarly across different cultures; and that items ranked negatively were more varied than those ranked positively, which co-author Sylvie Graf attributed to society's regulation of certain behaviors. Funder said that the RSQ is applicable to a wide range of fields and industries, which he believes is both a strength and a weakness. He also points to "the fundamental problem of cultural comparison that anyone conducting cultural comparison lives in a culture themselves."

Funder was the winner of the Jack Block Award in 2008 He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Association, Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. He is also a member of the European Association of Personality Psychology, Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and Society for Judgment and Decision Making.

Selected publications The Arden American (1966). Sacramento, CA: The Funderbolt News Service. "Errors and mistakes: Evaluating the accuracy of social judgment" (1987). Psychological Bulletin, 101, 75–90. . "Global traits: A neo-Allportian approach to personality" (1991). Psychological Science, 2, 31–39. . Funder & West (Eds.) "Consensus, self-other agreement, and accuracy in personality judgment: An introduction" (1993). Journal of Personality, 64, 457–476. . Funder, Parke, Tomlinson-Keasey, & Widaman (Eds.) Studying lives through time: Approaches to personality and development (1993). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. . "On the accuracy of personality judgement: A realistic approach" (1995). Psychological Review, 102, 652–670. . Personality judgment: A realistic approach to person perception (1999). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. . The Personality Puzzle (1997). 1st edition. New York: Norton. 2nd edition: 2000. 3rd edition: 2004. 4th edition: 2007. 5th edition: 2010. 6th edition: 2012. 7th edition: 2015. 8th edition: 2019. 9th edition: 2024. Funder & Ozer. "Evaluating effect size in psychological research: Sense and nonsense" (2019). Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 2, 156–168. .

Personal life Funder met his wife, Patricia Mayhew, while working at Harvey Mudd College in the early 1980s. They have two daughters.