Peter J. Rentfrow

Peter Jason Rentfrow is an American psychologist who is a professor of personality and individual differences in the Psychology Department at Cambridge University.

Early life and education Rentfrow was born on 4 June 1976. He studied at the University of Texas, first receiving an undergraduate degree in Psychology in 1998 and then a PhD in 2004 under the supervision of Samuel D. Gosling, William B. Swann, and James W. Pennebaker. He moved to the University of Cambridge in 2005.

In 2009 he collaborated with BBC Lab UK to develop an online personality test that was featured in Child of our Time. 400,000 people participated and in 2015, the results were used to develop another test that revealed where people would be happiest living in the UK. In 2016, he worked with the Sutton Trust and Robert de Vries on a report titled A Winning Personality which examined the influence of children's personalities and their family background on future career prospects. "Conscientiousness, self-discipline, efficiency and organisation" were found to be associated with higher incomes and the children of professionals were found to be more extroverted.

Rentfrow has collaborated with computer scientist Cecilia Mascolo to develop smartphone applications that measuring behavior and psychological states unobtrusively.

his publications had been cited 12,000 times and he had an h-index of 40. Rentfrow, Peter J., and Daniel J. Levitin, eds.Foundations in Music Psychology: Theory and Research. 2019.