Michael P. Grosz
LightNews LightNews
mp-grosz.bsky.social
Michael P. Grosz
@mp-grosz.bsky.social
1.2K followers 650 following 38 posts
Professor of Psychological Assessment at HMU Health & Medical University Potsdam (Germany). Research interests: personality, social status & causal inference
Posts Replies Media Videos
mp-grosz.bsky.social
Our paper about the GIPO data has now been officially published at Personality Science.

The paper is freely available at journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
In the Group Interaction and Perception of Others (GIPO) project, we collected data (N = 1460) containing a large number of self- and informant-reported personality items and incentivized measures of prosocial and cheating behavior. Many participants (N = 699) also attended a laboratory session in which they interacted in groups of 7–9 individuals in two modified versions of the public goods game with punishment. During and after the public goods games, participants reported their perceptions, expectations, and evaluations of each other through round-robin ratings. Due to the extensive assessments of personality and incentivized social behavior included in the GIPO data, these data are suitable for investigating the links between personality traits and prosocial and cheating behavior. Furthermore, they can be analyzed to gain a fine-grained picture of the perceptions, expectations, and evaluations that precede or follow behavior in economic games. Finally, researchers might want to use the GIPO data to investigate the psychometric properties and in particular the validity of the personality measures we used. To facilitate use of the data, we made the anonymized GIPO data publicly available. Taken together, the GIPO data are a publicly available rich resource for investigating the links between personality and incentivized social behavior.
July 3, 2025 at 9:12 AM
mp-grosz.bsky.social
❕NEW PAPER❕

We developed the M4, a reliable & valid Machiavellianism scale capturing affective, behavioral, cognitive, and motivational aspects of Mach.

Link: osf.io/preprints/ps...
Machiavellianism (Mach) is a personality trait characterized by cold rationality, cynicism, duplicity, and the strategic and egotistical pursuit of goals. Despite recent advances in the measurement of Mach, most Mach scales show limited content validity because they have not systematically integrated recurring Mach themes in the areas of affect (A), behavior (B), cognition (C), and desire (D). To overcome this and other issues, we developed a new Mach scale, the M4. We created the M4 by using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) to select 16 items from a pool of 92 newly generated and expert-rated Mach items. In two studies with German-speaking participants (N1 = 765; N2 = 1,288), the M4 total score showed high reliability and high convergent validity with established Mach scales and M4 informant reports. Furthermore, the nomological network of the M4 aligned in several respects with the theoretical conceptualization of Mach. However, some unexpected associations suggested the need to refine the conceptualization of Mach regarding its relationship with certain forms of impulsivity and neuroticism. Commonality analyses further indicated that the M4 predicted incentivized cheating behavior better than five other recently developed Mach measures. Hence, the M4 holds promise for advancing the assessment of Mach.
June 25, 2025 at 12:12 PM
mp-grosz.bsky.social
I’m excited to share my new preprint entitled “The Big Five Personality Traits are Composites Rather Than Common Causes”: osf.io/6ukqb_v1. 😀
The Big Five personality traits are among the most frequently measured psychological traits. They are often treated as common causes of the Big Five items in reflective measurement models such as factor analysis models and item response theory models. For example, extraversion items are modeled as reflective indicators influenced by the latent variable extraversion. However, the reflective measurement model’s assumption of unidimensionality is implausible because the Big Five do not correspond to five biological, environmental, or mental entities that could serve as common causes. The reflective model’s assumption of local independence is also implausible due to direct causal effects, semantic overlap, and logical consistencies among the Big Five items. Despite the implausibility of a reflective model, researchers continue to use methods and theories that implicitly or explicitly assume a reflective measurement model. As an alternative, I propose a composite-formative measurement model. A shift from a reflective to a composite-formative model implies that researchers should use composite-formative rather than reflective measurement models in structural equation models. Additionally, item retest reliabilities rather than Cronbach’s alpha or McDonald’s omega should be used to estimate reliability. The composite-formative model for the Big Five is as useful as the reflective measurement model for description and prediction. However, other predictive approaches are more accurate, and the Big Five composites are hardly useful for investigating causal effects. Overall, the composite-formative model overcomes the implausibility of the assumptions of the reflective measurement model while enabling personality researchers to continue to use the Big Five for descriptive research purposes.
April 17, 2025 at 12:29 PM
mp-grosz.bsky.social
Here is the gist of it
April 16, 2025 at 8:15 PM
mp-grosz.bsky.social
7 years ago, I received funding for a project on personality, incentivized prosocial behavior & social status in groups. Today, we've made the anonymized data publicly available. Researchers can now use it by citing the preprint/paper (no need to add anyone as a coauthor): doi.org/10.31234/osf...
In the Group Interaction and Perception of Others (GIPO) project, we collected data (N = 1,460) containing a large number of self- and informant-reported personality items and incentivized measures of prosocial and cheating behavior. Many participants (N = 699) also attended a laboratory session in which they interacted in groups of 7-9 individuals in two modified versions of the public goods game with punishment. During and after the public goods games, participants reported their perceptions, expectations, and evaluations of each other through round-robin ratings. Due to the extensive assessments of personality and incentivized social behavior included in the GIPO data, these data are suitable for investigating the links between personality traits and prosocial and cheating behavior. Furthermore, they can be analyzed to gain a fine-grained picture of the perceptions, expectations, and evaluations that precede or follow behavior in economic games. Finally, researchers might want to use the GIPO data to investigate the psychometric properties and in particular the validity of the personality measures we used. To facilitate use of the data, we made the anonymized GIPO data publicly available. Taken together, the GIPO data are a publicly available rich resource for investigating the links between personality and incentivized social behavior. Keywords: personality assessment, game theory, social dilemmas, social status, influence, likeability, trust, group dynamics
March 15, 2025 at 12:54 PM
mp-grosz.bsky.social
We have a freshly accepted manuscript about the influence of socially desireable responding on personality self-reports. Participants (N = 231) took the BFI-2 twice, first honestly and then with faking-good instructions in a job or dating context. Link to the preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...
Socially desirable responding can impair the validity of self-report questionnaires, especially in high-stakes situations in which people are incentivized to manage the impression they make on others. The current experiment examined the context dependency of impression management. Participants (N = 231) completed the Big Five Inventory-2 twice, first honestly and then with faking-good instructions in a job or dating context. Socially desirable responding was present in both contexts but was more pronounced in the job context than in the dating context for many (but not all) Big Five domains and facets. Future research should investigate whether faking behavior differs across contexts not only under faking-good instructions but also in high-stakes situations (e.g., personnel selection or online dating).
February 28, 2025 at 11:33 AM
mp-grosz.bsky.social
Ok, thanks. Looks like I need to read your blog post and simulate some data. 🤓
February 18, 2025 at 5:19 PM
mp-grosz.bsky.social
My manuscript on the factor structure of Big Five TRAIT measures at the between- and within-person level has now been published in the European Journal of Personality: doi.org/10.1177/0890...
free version: osf.io/preprints/ps...
(1/8)
November 27, 2023 at 10:14 AM