David C. Funder

David C. Funder (Ph.D., Stanford University, 1979) is a psychology professor who has written a number of important textbooks and research articles pertaining to the field of personality psychology. Funder resides as the chair of the Psychology department at the University of California, Riverside. He used to be a past editor of the Journal of Research and Personality, as well as being a former secondary editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Funder has been praised for his studies on personality judgment. He had also published research over the attribution theory and the "delay of gratification".

Funder has worked with professor Maynard C. Krueger researching over personality judgments. Their work consisted of trying to decipher which variables and factors result in either accurate or inaccurate personality judgments made from psychologists and "every day people". The experiment of their research consisted of the two professors retrieving self analyzed information about the patients, judgments created from close acquaintances of the patients, and also recordings of the subject's behaviour using taped cameras. This research led to the understanding that: a "good judge", a "good target", a "good trait", and "good information" will lead to a more accurate personal judgement. Much of this research follows a Q-sort paradigm. The Riverside Accuracy Project describes the Riverside situation Q-sort and the Riverside behavioral Q-sort.

Funder has also experimented in the area of an idea known as the "delay of gratification". Funder had performed this experiment with Daryl Bem. To research this idea the two psychologists gathered up a group of children and their parents for a study. The parents were first asked to give personality explanations of their children. Their children were then put into a room sitting in a chair with a bell in front of it. Next, the children were shown two pieces of candy, one being very appetizing and loved by the child, and the second piece of candy given to the child was less liked. The child was then told that if he or she rang the bell an adult will automatically enter the room presenting the candy of less desire, but if he or she waited for someone to come into the room the child would be rewarded with their candy of choice. During this experiment, the personalities of the children willing to wait the longest time for the candy contained an element of being mostly well mannered, obedient, and helpful, but not special and smart. The experiment helped lead Funder to understand that what he actually was testing was the child’s ability to cooperate with adults, not the child's ability to delay gratification.

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