Mitja D Back
Biographic Data
| ID | 203255 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mitja D Back |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mitja D |
| FAMILY NAME | Back |
| SIGNATURE | BACK M D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Münster |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2186-1558 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 84 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 482 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 84 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
How will I know if you really like me? Assessing the role of appearance, behavior, and reciprocity for metaliking accuracy in initial social encounters.
In first social encounters, people regularly try to figure out whether others like them. When accurate, these meta-liking judgments enable individuals to more optimally engage in social interactions. Although previous research shows that people do know how much others like them, little is known about the processes leading to accurate meta-liking judgments. In the present, pre-registered research, we aimed to close this gap by investigating the ro…
Receiving Applause “From the Right”
Most social groups punish freeriders (i.e., individuals who receive the same benefits from the group as others, despite contributing less to its success). In small groups, individual group members (rather than established authorities) typically implement this punishment spontaneously, and punishers may consequently be awarded social status by their peers. Here, we tested the preregistered hypothesis that this way of acquiring status works best wh…
Narcissism Runs in Families Due to Genetics
Narcissism is a personality trait with far-reaching individual, social, and societal consequences. Thus, it is important to understand the sources of individual differences in this trait. Existing hypotheses on the development of narcissism have focused on familial and parental environments that act to make siblings in a family more alike. However, the relative importance of shared environments as opposed to other environmental and genetic source…
Intuitive Judgments of Strangers Are More Popular but Not More Accurate Than Deliberate Ones
Popular advice in media and self-help literature encourages people to trust their intuition when forming impressions of strangers. We tested this widespread lay belief by examining whether intuitive judgments are preferred over deliberate ones and whether such preferences are justified by differences in accuracy. In Study 1 ( n = 401), participants from the general population reported using intuition more frequently, preferring it, and expressing…
Using machine learning to predict individual differences in psychological reactivities to social interactions
Individual differences in psychological reactivities (i.e., the degree to which individuals react differently to social interactions) are central to psychological research. Previous theory-based research has identified substantial individual differences in reactivities but few robust predictors of these differences. This work aimed to address two questions: First, can individual differences in reactivities to social interactions be accurately pre…
Differential Behavioral Pathways Linking Personality to Leadership Emergence and Effectiveness in Groups
This study integrates leadership process models with process models of personality and behavioral personality science to examine the behavioral–perceptual pathways that explain interpersonal personality traits’ divergent relation to group leadership evaluations. We applied data from an online group interaction study ( N = 364) alternately assigning participants as leaders conducting brief tasks. We used four variable types to build the pathways i…
Explicit Beliefs About Nonverbal Behavior and the Big Five Traits
INTRODUCTION: Everyday experience as well as the research literature on trait attributions suggest that people use nonverbal cues when judging the personality of a person. However, little research has reported on people's explicitly held beliefs about these associations. METHODS: Two hundred forty-five participants recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk rated how strongly they thought 20 nonverbal cues are related to each of the Big Five trai…
Affiliation motive and social interactions in people’s daily life
Individual differences in social traits such as the affiliation motive are closely linked to the formation and maintenance of social relationships. Most previous research focused on long-term characteristics or momentary assessments of social relationships (e.g., social network size, relationship quality), whereas theoretical accounts have emphasized the temporal dynamics, that is, how social interactions unfold over time. The present studies exa…
Appearing smart, confident and motivated
Which behavioral and visual information do teachers rely on when judging relevant characteristics of their students and which cues should they rely on? Drawing on Brunswik’s Lens Model (Perception and the representative design of psychological experiments, University of California Press, 1956. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520350519 ), we investigated the role of students’ expression of nonverbal behavioral cues (e.g., friendly facial expression) a…
An interdisciplinary linked-lives approach to individual differences in social behaviour
Relationships between resumé cues and applicants' personality
Human resource (HR) professionals regularly draw personality inferences from applicants' resumés. Building on the lens model, we illuminate resumés' potential for accurately inferring personality by examining valid resumé cues indicating personality. We assessed self‐reported big five traits and narcissism of 141 business students at career start applying with resumés for a fictional position. Drawing on personality theory and empirical findings,…
A meta-analytic review of the associations of personality, intelligence, and physical size with social status
Theories have proposed diverse reasons for why individual differences such as personality traits lead to social status attainment in face-to-face groups. We integrated these different theoretical standpoints into a model with four paths from individual differences to status: a dominance, a competence, a virtue, and a micropolitics path. To investigate these paths, we meta-analyzed over 100 years of research on bivariate associations of personalit…
Development of narcissism across the life span
This meta-analytic review investigated the development of narcissism across the life span, by synthesizing the available longitudinal data on mean-level change and rank-order stability. Three factors of narcissism were examined: agentic, antagonistic, and neurotic narcissism. Analyses were based on data from 51 samples, including 37,247 participants. As effect size measures, we used the standardized mean change d per year and test-retest correlat…
Narcissists’ affective well-being
2,125; total measurements = 116,336). As hypothesized, we found diverging associations between agentic and antagonistic aspects of narcissism with affect levels: Whereas narcissistic admiration was related to more pleasant affective states, narcissistic rivalry was related to less pleasant ones. We also obtained some support for diverging effects of admiration and rivalry on affect variability. However, these associations were largely reduced whe…
Who feels marginalized? A latent class analysis of perceived societal marginalization
Previous research has followed a binary perspective in analyzing the effects of modernization and globalization, often assumed to produce the societal camps of both “winners” and “losers” in economic, cultural, and political terms. However, our understanding of these individual differences and the social groups that perceive themselves as disadvantaged by society is still limited. Hence, in contrast to previous findings we argue that the phenomen…
Examining individual differences in metaperceptive accuracy using the social meta-accuracy model
To what extent do individuals differ in understanding how others see them and who is particularly good at it? Answering these questions about the "good metaperceiver" is relevant given the beneficial outcomes of meta-accuracy. However, there likely is more than one type of the good metaperceiver: One who knows the specific impressions they make more than others do ( dyadic meta-accuracy ) and one who knows their reputation more than others do (ge…
Narcissistic status pursuit in everyday social life
36,074), we first found that the perceived assignment of status, attack on status, and neglect of status were related to status-relevant behaviors (i.e., expressive, combative, and avoidant behaviors) and emotions (e.g., pride, anger, and shame) within persons on average. Next, we found that both mean levels of perceptual, behavioral, and emotional states and status contingencies (i.e., the within-person relationships of status perceptions with b…
Age and gender differences in narcissism
Version IV, Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire-Short Form, Single-Item Narcissism Scale, and brief version of the Pathological Narcissism Inventory). The findings of Study 1 (N = 5,736) revealed heterogeneity in how strongly the measures are correlated. Some instruments loaded clearly on one of the three factors proposed by previous research (i.e., Neuroticism, Extraversion, Antagonism), while others cross-loaded across factors and…
Extraversion, social interactions, and well-being during the Covid-19 pandemic
A large body of research suggests that extraversion is positively related to well-being. However, it is unclear whether this association can be explained by social participation (i.e., more extraverted individuals engage in social interactions more frequently) or social reactivity (i.e., more extraverted individuals profit more from social interactions) processes. Here, we examined the role of social interactions for the extraversion-well-being r…
Well-being in social interactions
864) who completed a total of 139,363 experience sampling surveys (reporting on 87,976 social interactions). We focus on the effects of different modes of communication (face-to-face [FtF] interactions, computer-mediated communication [CMC], and mixed episodes [FtF + CMC]), and types of interaction partners (close peers, family members, and weak ties). Using multilevel structural equation modeling, we found that FtF interactions and mixed episode…
The personality traits of self-made and inherited millionaires
Very wealthy people influence political and societal processes by wielding their economic power through foundations, lobbying groups, media campaigns, as investors and employers. Because personality shapes goals, attitudes, and behaviour, it is important to understand the personality traits that characterize the rich. We used representative survey data to construct two large samples, one from the general population and one consisting of individua…
Assessing Maladaptive Personality in the Forensic Context
The current study proposes an adaptation of the PID-5 to assesses maladaptive personal traits in forensic settings. Specifically, we adapted the item set of the PID-5 Faceted Brief Form (PID-5-FBF) to the forensic context and validated the resulting PID-5 Forensic Faceted Brief Form (PID-5-FFBF) using self- and informant-reports of 199 male prisoners. Exploratory factor analyses suggested a four-factor solution comprising Antagonism, Detachment, …
Perceiver Effects in First Impressions Reflect Generalized Stereotypes
In interpersonal perception, perceivers’ tendencies for judging the average target (perceiver effects) are commonly assumed to reflect generalized stereotypes about “the other.” This is empirically supported by findings of consistent rank-orders of perceiver effects across measurement occasions, but previous studies could not rule out important alternative explanations for consistency. Here, we present a strict test of the generalized stereotype …
The Role of Personality in Covid-19-Related Perceptions, Evaluations, and Behaviors
Individuals and institutions around the world have been affected by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Herein, we investigate the role of basic (Big Five and HEXACO) and specific (Dark Factor of Personality, Narcissistic Rivalry, and Narcissistic Admiration) personality traits for 17 criteria related to COVID-19, grouped into (i) personal perceptions in terms of risks and worries about the disease, (ii) behavioral adjustments in terms of fo…
Von Verteidigern und Entdeckern
Dieses Buch zeigt, dass der aktuelle Identitätskonflikt mit Gefühlen gesellschaftlicher Marginalisierung und politischer Repräsentation verbunden ist
Narcissistic admiration and rivalry
We present a process model that distinguishes 2 dimensions of narcissism: admiration and rivalry. We propose that narcissists' overarching goal of maintaining a grandiose self is pursued by 2 separate pathways, characterized by distinct cognitive, affective-motivational, and behavioral processes. In a set of 7 studies, we validated this 2-dimensional model using the newly developed Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire (NARQ). We show…
Why are narcissists so charming at first sight? Decoding the narcissism–popularity link at zero acquaintance
On the basis of a realistic behavioral approach, the authors showed that narcissists are popular at zero acquaintance and aimed to explain why this is the case. In Study 1, a group of psychology freshmen (N = 73) judged each other on the basis of brief self-introductions using a large round-robin design (2,628 dyads). Three main findings were revealed: First, narcissism leads to popularity at first sight. Second, the aspects of narcissism that ar…
Predicting actual behavior from the explicit and implicit self-concept of personality
The authors present a behavioral process model of personality that specifies explicit and implicit aspects of the self-concept of personality as predictors of actual behavior. An extensive behavioral study (N = 130) including a variety of relevant social situations was conducted. This approach allowed reliable measurement of more than 50 behavioral indicators. A priori assignment of indicators to the Big Five dimensions was conducted on the basis…
Narcissism and romantic relationships
Narcissism is known to be related to romantic success in short-term contexts (dating, early stage relationships) but also to problems in long-term committed relationships. We propose that these diverging romantic outcomes of narcissism can be explained by differential associations with agentic versus antagonistic dimensions of grandiose narcissism: Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry. Both dimensions serve the central narcissistic goal of gaining…
Behavioral processes underlying the decline of narcissists’ popularity over time
Following a dual-pathway approach to the social consequences of grandiose narcissism, we investigated the behavioral processes underlying (a) the decline of narcissists' popularity in social groups over time and (b) how this is differentially influenced by the 2 narcissism facets admiration and rivalry. In a longitudinal laboratory study, participants (N = 311) first provided narcissism self-reports using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory an…
The Social Relations Model
The social relations model (SRM) is an intriguing tool both to conceptualize and to analyze dyadic processes. We begin with explaining why interpersonal phenomena in everyday life are more complex than often considered. We then show how the SRM accounts for these complexities by decomposing interpersonal perceptions and behaviors into three independent components and describe the designs required to investigate these components. We then provide a…
The policy relevance of personality traits
Personality traits are powerful predictors of outcomes in the domains of education, work, relationships, health, and well-being. The recognized importance of personality traits has raised questions about their policy relevance, that is, their potential to inform policy actions designed to improve human welfare. Traditionally, the use of personality traits in applied settings has been predicated on their ability to predict valued outcomes, typical…
Puffed-up but shaky selves
Different theoretical conceptualizations characterize grandiose narcissists by high, yet fragile self-esteem. Empirical evidence, however, has been inconsistent, particularly regarding the relationship between narcissism and self-esteem fragility (i.e., self-esteem variability). Here, we aim at unraveling this inconsistency by disentangling the effects of two theoretically distinct facets of narcissism (i.e., admiration and rivalry) on the two as…
Narcissism and the use of personal pronouns revisited
[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 109(3) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see record 2015-37773-002). The authors erroneously reported the overall correlation, first stated in the abstract, between Narcissism and total first-person-singular use as .02 (.017) instead of .01 (.010). The misreporting of the overall correlation between Narcissism and total use of first-person singular does not change …
Trait personality and state variability
Wherever I may roam
Previous studies on self-esteem development show substantial changes as well as interindividual differences in change from adolescence to young adulthood. However, the processes underlying these developmental trajectories are still not well understood. The aim of the present study was to shed light on the macro- and microprocesses of self-esteem development. We investigated a sample of 876 German high school students (M = 16.0 years at Time 1) pa…
Becoming Friends by Chance
Tell me a story and I will tell you who you are! Lens model analyses of personality and creative writing
How extraverted is [email protected]? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses
Is accurate, positive, or inflated self-perception most advantageous for psychological adjustment? A competitive test of key hypotheses
Empirical research on the (mal-)adaptiveness of favorable self-perceptions, self-enhancement, and self-knowledge has typically applied a classical null-hypothesis testing approach and provided mixed and even contradictory findings. Using data from 5 studies (laboratory and field, total N = 2,823), we used an information-theoretic approach combined with Response Surface Analysis to provide the first competitive test of 6 popular hypotheses: that m…
Do accurate personality impressions benefit early relationship development? The bidirectional associations between accuracy and liking
Does forming accurate impressions benefit emerging relationships? In 2 longitudinal studies (Study 1: 235 participants, 534 dyads, 2 time points; Study 2: 122 participants, 3,023 dyads, 7 time points), we examined whether more accurate personality impressions among new acquaintances fostered greater liking over time for both the perceiver and target (accuracy fosters liking hypothesis). Further, we examined whether greater perceiver and target li…
Narcissistic status pursuit in everyday social life
36,074), we first found that the perceived assignment of status, attack on status, and neglect of status were related to status-relevant behaviors (i.e., expressive, combative, and avoidant behaviors) and emotions (e.g., pride, anger, and shame) within persons on average. Next, we found that both mean levels of perceptual, behavioral, and emotional states and status contingencies (i.e., the within-person relationships of status perceptions with b…
What is the structure of perceiver effects? On the importance of global positivity and trait-specificity across personality domains and judgment contexts
When judging others' personalities, perceivers differ in their general judgment tendencies. These perceiver effects partly reflect a response bias but are also stable and psychologically important individual differences. However, current insights into the basic structure of perceiver effects are ambiguous with previous research pointing to either a unidimensional structure (i.e., people see others as globally positive vs. negative) or a multidime…
Individual differences in contingencies between situation characteristics and personality states
Contingencies between situational variables and psychological states have been proposed as key individual difference variables by many theoretical approaches to personality. Despite their relevance, the basic properties, nomological correlates, and factor structure of individual differences in contingencies have not been examined so far. We address these fundamental questions in five studies with overall N = 952 participants and N = 32,052 unique…
Linguistic Markers of Grandiose Narcissism
Narcissism is unrelated to using first-person singular pronouns. Whether narcissism is linked to other language use remains unclear. We aimed to identify linguistic markers of narcissism. We applied the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to texts ( k = 15; N = 4,941). The strongest positive correlates were using words related to sports, second-person pronouns, and swear words. The strongest negative correlates were using anxiety/fear words, tentat…
The dual lens model
An integrative framework for the examination of self-other agreement of personality judgments at zero acquaintance is outlined that integrates dualistic approaches to personality, behavior, and personality judgments within the Brunswikian (1956) lens model. The dual lens model (DLM) distinguishes between explicit and implicit self-concepts of personality, controlled and automatic cues, and deliberate and intuitive personality judgments. In a firs…
Age and gender differences in narcissism
Version IV, Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire-Short Form, Single-Item Narcissism Scale, and brief version of the Pathological Narcissism Inventory). The findings of Study 1 (N = 5,736) revealed heterogeneity in how strongly the measures are correlated. Some instruments loaded clearly on one of the three factors proposed by previous research (i.e., Neuroticism, Extraversion, Antagonism), while others cross-loaded across factors and…
Well-being in social interactions
864) who completed a total of 139,363 experience sampling surveys (reporting on 87,976 social interactions). We focus on the effects of different modes of communication (face-to-face [FtF] interactions, computer-mediated communication [CMC], and mixed episodes [FtF + CMC]), and types of interaction partners (close peers, family members, and weak ties). Using multilevel structural equation modeling, we found that FtF interactions and mixed episode…
Narcissists’ affective well-being
2,125; total measurements = 116,336). As hypothesized, we found diverging associations between agentic and antagonistic aspects of narcissism with affect levels: Whereas narcissistic admiration was related to more pleasant affective states, narcissistic rivalry was related to less pleasant ones. We also obtained some support for diverging effects of admiration and rivalry on affect variability. However, these associations were largely reduced whe…
Neuroticism and emotional risk during the Covid-19 pandemic
Who is late and who is early? Big Five personality factors and punctuality in attending psychological experiments
How extraverted is [email protected]? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses
Becoming Friends by Chance
Unraveling the three faces of self-esteem
Predicting actual behavior from the explicit and implicit self-concept of personality
The authors present a behavioral process model of personality that specifies explicit and implicit aspects of the self-concept of personality as predictors of actual behavior. An extensive behavioral study (N = 130) including a variety of relevant social situations was conducted. This approach allowed reliable measurement of more than 50 behavioral indicators. A priori assignment of indicators to the Big Five dimensions was conducted on the basis…
Facebook Profiles Reflect Actual Personality, Not Self-Idealization
Tell me a story and I will tell you who you are! Lens model analyses of personality and creative writing
The Social Relations Model
The social relations model (SRM) is an intriguing tool both to conceptualize and to analyze dyadic processes. We begin with explaining why interpersonal phenomena in everyday life are more complex than often considered. We then show how the SRM accounts for these complexities by decomposing interpersonal perceptions and behaviors into three independent components and describe the designs required to investigate these components. We then provide a…
Why are narcissists so charming at first sight? Decoding the narcissism–popularity link at zero acquaintance
On the basis of a realistic behavioral approach, the authors showed that narcissists are popular at zero acquaintance and aimed to explain why this is the case. In Study 1, a group of psychology freshmen (N = 73) judged each other on the basis of brief self-introductions using a large round-robin design (2,628 dyads). Three main findings were revealed: First, narcissism leads to popularity at first sight. Second, the aspects of narcissism that ar…
The dual lens model
An integrative framework for the examination of self-other agreement of personality judgments at zero acquaintance is outlined that integrates dualistic approaches to personality, behavior, and personality judgments within the Brunswikian (1956) lens model. The dual lens model (DLM) distinguishes between explicit and implicit self-concepts of personality, controlled and automatic cues, and deliberate and intuitive personality judgments. In a firs…
An integrative lens model approach to bias and accuracy in human inferences
The present article integrates research on the accurate inference of personality traits with process models of hindsight bias (the tendency to exaggerate in hindsight what one had said in foresight). Specifically, the article suggests a new model that integrates assumptions of the lens model on accurate personality judgments and accounts that view hindsight effects as a by-product of knowledge updating. We suggest 3 processes that have the potent…
The Two Pathways to Being an (Un‐)Popular Narcissist
OBJECTIVE: Narcissism affects social relationships from the very first interactions. The overall positivity of social impressions narcissists evoke is, however, unclear-with previous research reporting positive, negative, or null effects on popularity at short-term acquaintance. Here we postulate a dual-pathway model, which explains the effects of narcissism on (un-)popularity as the result of two opposing behavioral pathways: assertiveness and a…
Being popular in online social networks
Narcissistic admiration and rivalry
We present a process model that distinguishes 2 dimensions of narcissism: admiration and rivalry. We propose that narcissists' overarching goal of maintaining a grandiose self is pursued by 2 separate pathways, characterized by distinct cognitive, affective-motivational, and behavioral processes. In a set of 7 studies, we validated this 2-dimensional model using the newly developed Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Questionnaire (NARQ). We show…
Implicit Interpersonal Attraction in Small Groups
The present research investigated the nature and behavioral consequences of interpersonal attraction in small groups. In line with dual-process models of information processing, we studied the influence of implicit and explicit evaluations of interaction partners on actual friendly behavior in two social contexts. In two studies, 247 unacquainted same-sex participants ( N 1 = 139; N 2 = 108)—assigned to groups of four to six members—rated each ot…
Who Attains Status? Similarities and Differences Across Social Contexts
Informal groups form hierarchies and allocate social status in order to coordinate action and make collective decisions. Although researchers have identified characteristics of people who tend to get status, the extent to which these characteristics are context-dependent is unclear. In two studies, participants from the United States ( N = 157) and Germany ( N = 95) engaged in affiliative or competitive group interactions. We investigated whether…
Narcissistic Tendencies Among Actors
Building on a two-dimensional reconceptualization of grandiose narcissism, we investigated how narcissistic admiration (the tendency toward agentic self-promotion) and rivalry (the tendency toward other derogation) are related to acting. Study 1 ( N = 583) showed that acting students scored higher on narcissistic admiration than students with other majors, but at the same time, the acting students scored lower on rivalry. In Study 2 ( N = 283), w…
Accurate Judgments of Neuroticism at Zero Acquaintance
Prior studies have consistently found a surprising inaccuracy of people's neuroticism judgments at zero acquaintance. Based on the Realistic Accuracy Model (Funder, 1995), we hypothesize that this is due to a lack of relevance of the situation in which targets are typically observed. Fifty participants were videotaped in a highly trait-relevant (i.e., socially stressful) situation as well as three less relevant situations. An aggregate of self-re…
Who is open to a narcissistic romantic partner? The roles of sensation seeking, trait anxiety, and similarity
Narcissism and the use of personal pronouns revisited
[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 109(3) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see record 2015-37773-002). The authors erroneously reported the overall correlation, first stated in the abstract, between Narcissism and total first-person-singular use as .02 (.017) instead of .01 (.010). The misreporting of the overall correlation between Narcissism and total use of first-person singular does not change …
Behavioral processes underlying the decline of narcissists’ popularity over time
Following a dual-pathway approach to the social consequences of grandiose narcissism, we investigated the behavioral processes underlying (a) the decline of narcissists' popularity in social groups over time and (b) how this is differentially influenced by the 2 narcissism facets admiration and rivalry. In a longitudinal laboratory study, participants (N = 311) first provided narcissism self-reports using the Narcissistic Personality Inventory an…
Wherever I may roam
Previous studies on self-esteem development show substantial changes as well as interindividual differences in change from adolescence to young adulthood. However, the processes underlying these developmental trajectories are still not well understood. The aim of the present study was to shed light on the macro- and microprocesses of self-esteem development. We investigated a sample of 876 German high school students (M = 16.0 years at Time 1) pa…
Entering adulthood in a recession tempers later narcissism – But only in men
The narcissism-overclaiming link revisited
Trait personality and state variability
Psychology (74 works) · Social Psychology (72 works) · Personality Traits and Psychology (48 works) · Personality (47 works) · Big Five personality traits (33 works) · Developmental psychology (30 works) · Narcissism (25 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (25 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (22 works) · Social Psychology (21 works)