Academic Background

BA, Psychology, University of Chicago
PhD, Social-Personality Psychology, Columbia University
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Social-Organizational Psychology, Columbia Business School

Biography

My research explores the influence of personality and social cognition on behavior in relationships (including romantic relationships, friendships, and working relationships).  Currently, I am working on three main lines of research.

In the first line of work, I am investigating causal factors that lead individuals to "fail" their relationship partners. When people fail to keep promises or fail to enact positive relationship behaviors, it is tempting to think that "if s/he cared about me enough, s/he would have come through." In my lab, we are testing the hypothesis that some relational failures are indeed failures of love, but many others are failures of self regulation.  In a recent series of studies, we showed that love is an excellent predictor of promising, but a poor predictor of behavior follow-through. Actual behavior is better predicted by factors related to self-regulation skill, such as trait conscientiousness.  We are currently investigating the conditions under which love versus self-regulation skill is a better predictor of positive relationship behavior.

In the second line of work, I investigate how individuals judge other people's failures and transgressions. We have shown that some kinds of transgressions, such as disagreeable or unconscientious behavior, are generally judged more harshly than other kinds of transgressions, such as unsocial or unsophisticated behavior. This appears to be particularly true if the judge is a person who is high on trait communion or trait agreeableness. In ongoing research, we are trying to understand the processes by which people high in agreeableness "transform" their initially harsh judgments of communal violations into more forgiving attitudes.

In the third line of research, I am investigating the factors that predict whether a person will openly discuss their dissatisfactions with relationship partners and whether they are able to negotiate to get their needs met. In my lab, we have found that people who believe their partners can change are more likely to raise a relationship issue with a romantic partner, friend, or colleague. People are also more likely to raise an issue if they expect the discussion might solve the problem without hurting the relationship (and if their expectancies are negative, they will remain silent even if the problem is serious). We have found that people who are high in trait agency are likely to have overly optimistic expectancies about the effects of being assertive with another person, whereas people who are low in trait agency are likely to have overly pessimistic expectancies.

Additional Information

Kammrath, L.K. (2009). The expected consequences of interpersonal action: How the same relational behaviors mean different things to people with different personality profiles. Manuscript under review.

People’s knowledge about relational behavior includes if-then behavior schemas for how particular types of behavior, such as acting coldly or acting assertively, will typically impact others. In this paper, it is argued that a person’s own personality configuration of if-then responses in social interactions (Mischel & Shoda, 1995) contributes to that person’s beliefs about the meaning and impact of relational behaviors more generally. Specifically, it is argued that people who experience strong (or weak) responses to behaviors that vary along a particular trait dimension, such as warmth-coldness, will expect others to experience similarly strong (or weak) responses to those same kinds of behaviors.  In three studies, it was demonstrated that people who are high in trait communion expect others to respond more strongly to behaviors that vary in warmth-coldness than do people who are low in trait communion, and that people who are low in trait agency expect others to respond more strongly to behaviors that vary in assertive-unassertiveness than do people who are high in trait agency. Studies 2 and 3 suggested that it was participants’ own if-then personality profiles that accounted, at least in part, for the effects of personality traits on participants’ if-then schemas for relational behavior.

Kammrath, L.K., & Scholer, A.A. (2009) The high-maintenance perceiver: How highly communal and agreeable people judge positive and negative relational acts.Manuscript under review.

Although agreeable people have often been shown to be positively biased towards others, five studies provide evidence that agreeableness is associated with extremity effects, not simple positivity effects, in social judgment. Across studies, agreeable participants judged prosocial behaviors more favorably, but antisocial behaviors more unfavorably, than did disagreeable participants. In support of a goal-congruence mechanism (e.g. Fitzsimons & Shah, 2008), Studies 2-5 demonstrated that agreeable perceivers were particularly sensitive to communal (vs. agentic) violations. A longitudinal study of real-life impressions supported the laboratory evidence that agreeable people are highly sensitive to both the prosocial and antisocial behavior of others (Study 5). We discuss how the current account complements and extends existing theories of agreeableness.

McCarthy, M., & Kammrath, L.K. (2009). Raising an issue in a relationship: I’ll tell you what’s wrong but only if I think it will help. Manuscript under review.

When we become dissatisfied with a close partner, we face a dilemma: to voice our concerns or remain silent.  Past research suggests degree of dissatisfaction does not differentiate concerns that are voiced from those that are not. What, then, influences the decision to voice? Two studies investigated the hypothesis that, because disclosure is risky, outcome expectancies may be more influential than problem seriousness. In each study, participants described a relational dissatisfaction they were considering disclosing. Expectancies for instrumental outcomes were the strongest predictor of intentions to voice during the following week. Study 2 revealed that actual voice behavior by the week’s end was predicted by both instrumental and relational expectancies. Thus, the participants who told their loved ones what was bothering them were not those who were most upset, but rather those who thought raising the issue would solve the problem without harming the relationship.

Friesen, C. & Kammrath, L.K. (2009). What pushes your buttons? How knowledge about if-then personality profiles can benefit relationships. Manuscript under review.

Past research has debated the benefits of having accurate knowledge about a close other’s personality traits. In this paper, we argue that having accurate knowledge about personality profiles – knowing a person’s characteristic pattern of responses to different situations – should be particularly valuable in relationships. We approach the issue of profile accuracy by looking at interpersonal trigger profiles, which describe a person’s unique pattern of reactivity to various potentially aversive interpersonal situations. To measure trigger profiles we developed the Trigger Profile Questionnaire, which consists of 72 descriptions of potentially bothersome interpersonal behaviours. Participants rated how much each behaviour triggered them personally, and how much it might trigger a friend. Friend-pairs who had known each other longer were more accurate about each other’s trigger profiles. This contextualized personality knowledge was advantageous in friendships; trigger profile accuracy was associated with reduced feelings of conflict in the relationship, and increased feelings of depth.

Peetz, J., & Kammrath, L.K. (2009).  Only because I love you: Why people make and why they break promises in romantic relationships. Manuscript under review.

People make and break promises frequently in interpersonal relationships. We examine relationship promises from the perspective of the person making the promise, and investigate the processes leading up to making promises and the processes involved in keeping them. In four studies, we demonstrate that people who are the most in love (highly satisfied and highly motivated to make their romantic partner happy) make bigger promises than other people, but are not any better at keeping them. Instead, promisers’ self-regulation skills, such as trait conscientiousness, predicted the extent to which promises were kept or broken. In a causal test of our hypotheses, participants who were focused on their love for their partner promised more, whereas participants who generated a plan of self-regulation followed through more on their promises. Thus, people were making promises for very different reasons (love) than what made them keep these promises (self-regulation skill). Ironically, then, those who are happiest in their relationship may be most likely to break their romantic promises, as they are making ambitious commitments they are later unable to keep.

Ames, D.R., Kammrath, L.K. & Suppes, A. (2009). Not so fast: The weak link between confidence and accuracy in thin slice impressions. In press at Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Psychologists and non-psychologists alike have recently been captivated by demonstrations that, on average, perceivers show significant accuracy in their snap judgments of others. Yet beneath mean levels of accuracy lies tremendous variance—some snap judgments are valid, others wrongheaded. An essential question, therefore, is whether people can intuit when their first impressions are accurate. In two new studies of snap impressions, and in new analyses of prior studies featuring impressions based on offices and bedrooms (Gosling, Ko, Mannarelli, & Morris, 2002), we examine links between thin slice accuracy and metacognition. The data reveal that while some perceivers were impressively accurate some of the time, confidence in impressions was uncalibrated with accuracy. Ratings of confidence in a given judgment more closely reflected a person’s general confidence in other judgments than accuracy in the specific instance. Moreover, perceivers generally displayed overconfidence. Implications for work on thin slice judgments are discussed.

Kammrath, L.K., Ames, D.R., & Scholer, A.A. (2007).  Keeping up impressions: Inferential standards for impression change across the Big Five. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 450-457.

Not all first impressions have equal longevity. Which kinds of impression have the greatest mobility–downward and upward–over the course of acquaintanceships? In this article, we propose an inferential account of impression maintenance across Big Five trait domains. With data from field and laboratory studies, we provide evidence that positive impressions of agreeableness (A), conscientiousness (C), and emotional stability (ES) are especially vulnerable to small amounts of contrary evidence, whereas positive first impressions of extraversion (E) and openness (O) are more resistant to contrary information. Impressions of E and O demonstrated minimal susceptibility to negativity effects in a longitudinal study of college roommate impressions (Study 1), in a study of perceivers’ implicit theories about different trait domains (Study 2), and in an experimental study of manipulated impression change (Study 3).

Kammrath, L.K. & Dweck, C. (2006).  Voicing conflict: Preferred conflict strategies among incremental and entity and theorists. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32, 1497-1508.

How individuals choose to handle their feelings during interpersonal conflicts has important consequences for relationship outcomes. Will they voice their dissatisfaction, forgive and forget, or act out with hostile words and deeds? In two studies, we predict and find evidence that people’s implicit theory of personality is an important predictor of conflict behavior following a relationship transgression.  Data from a retrospective study of conflict in dating relationships (Study 1) and a prospective study of daily conflict experiences (Study 2) demonstrated that incremental theorists – who believe personality can change and improve – were highly likely to voice their displeasure with others openly and constructively during conflict.  Conversely, entity theorists – who believe personality is fundamentally fixed – were unlikely to express their feelings of dissatisfaction openly with the targets of their displeasure. Study 2 revealed that this divergence was increasingly pronounced as conflicts increased in severity: the higher the stakes, the stronger the effect.

Kammrath, L.K., Mendoza-Denton, R., & Mischel, W. (2005).  Incorporating if…then… signatures in person perception: Beyond the person-situation dichotomy.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 605-618.

Complex schemas (Kelley, 1972) have been traditionally under-represented in the study of lay causal models.  Nevertheless, complex schemas have particular significance for attribution theory in that they depict dispositions and situations as interactive -- not dichotomous -- causal forces. Three studies find that 1) complex schemas lead perceivers to impart dispositional meaning to stable patterns of situation-behavior variation, and 2) complex schemas are particularly likely to be adopted when the inference task involves motivational attributions.  Study 1 showed that perceivers associated five motivational traits with characteristic and distinctive if…then…  profiles (if situation A, then the person does X, but if situation B, then the person does Y).  Study 2 demonstrated that perceivers used information about a target’s stable if…then… profile to draw conclusions about her motives and traits.   Study 3 suggested that perceivers are more likely to draw on profile information when inferring motivational traits than when inferring behavioral traits. Together, these findings point to the significance of complex motivational schemas that take of account of stable person-situation interactions (she is friendly if A but mean if B) in everyday social explanations.

Ames, D.R., & Kammrath, L.K. (2004).  Mind-reading and metacognition: Narcissism, not actual competence, predicts self-estimated ability. Journal of Non-Verbal Behavior, 28, 187-210.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between people’s actual interpersonal sensitivity (such as their ability to identify deception and to infer intentions and emotions) and their perceptions of their own sensitivity. Like prior scholars, we find the connection is weak or non-existent and that most people overestimate their social judgment and mind-reading skills. Unlike previous work, however, we show new evidence about who misunderstands their sensitivity and why. We find that those who perform the worst in social judgment and mindreading radically overestimate their relative competence. We also find origins of these self-estimates in general narcissistic tendencies toward self-aggrandizement. We discuss evidence from two studies, one involving the Interpersonal Perception Task (the IPT-15) and another focusing on inferences about partners after a faceto-face negotiation exercise. In both cases, actual performance did not predict self-estimated performance but narcissism did.