The Psych Files

Category: Personality

  • Why the Whites of Your Eyes Shape a Stranger’s First Impression

    Why the Whites of Your Eyes Shape a Stranger’s First Impression

    You meet someone for the first time, and within a second or two you’ve already decided something about them — whether you’d trust them, whether you’d want to keep talking. You didn’t run through a checklist. It just happened. And it turns out one of the things your brain quietly picks up on is something you’ve probably never once thought about on purpose: how much of the white of a person’s eyes you can see.

    A study published in PLOS One by Mathias Boyer-Brosseau, Simon Rigoulot, and Sébastien Hétu looked at exactly that — the sclera, the white outer layer of the eyeball — and how the amount of it we can see shapes our first impressions. I came across this one on PsyPost, in a write-up by Eric W. Dolan, and it’s a great example of how a feature you’d never mention out loud can be doing real work behind the scenes.

    Here’s what they did. They took photos of faces with neutral expressions from a well-known set called the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database. Then they digitally created two versions of each face — one showing a smaller amount of visible white (about 31.5% of the visible eye) and one showing more (about 43.8%) — while keeping everything else about the face identical. Then 162 adults rated the faces on four things: how much they’d trust the person, whether they’d interact with them, how attractive they found them, and where they’d place them in the social pecking order.

    The result was remarkably consistent. Faces showing more of the white of the eye were rated as more trustworthy, more attractive, more sociable, and higher in social rank. And this wasn’t a quirk of one group — it held for male and female faces, and for male and female raters alike. A cue you never consciously register nudged four separate judgments in the same direction.

    So why would the amount of white matter at all? Part of the answer is that these judgments are fast and effortless — a textbook case of automatic processing, the mental work that happens without conscious awareness or intent. You’re not deciding to evaluate someone’s sclera; your brain does it for you and hands you a feeling. The researchers offer two evolutionary psychology explanations — the idea that some mental traits stuck around because they helped our ancestors solve social problems. Humans are unusual in having such visible whites, which makes it easy to follow exactly where someone is looking, and reading gaze is a huge part of getting along with other people. On top of that, scleral exposure tends to peak in our early twenties and shrink as we age, so more white may quietly read as youth, health, and vitality.

    There’s another layer here worth naming. A surface feature swaying a bunch of deeper judgments is basically peripheral route persuasion — attitude change that runs on superficial cues like attractiveness rather than on any real evidence about the person. And the ratings all moved together: faces judged attractive were also judged trustworthy, the classic attractiveness halo effect, where one good impression bleeds into all the others.

    I have to admit, as a former college professor this one landed a little uncomfortably. I formed quick reads on students and colleagues all the time, and I’m sure I told myself those reads were based on something substantial. Studies like this are a good reminder that a chunk of my “gut” was probably running on cues about this superficial.

    One honest caveat, and it’s a good one for anyone studying research methods: to add more visible white, the team had to make the eye itself a little bigger, so they couldn’t fully separate “more white” from “bigger eyes.” That’s a confounding variable — a second factor riding along with the one you care about, muddying the cause. The faces and raters were also mostly White, so we don’t yet know how far this travels across cultures.

    What do you actually do with this? You can’t change your sclera, and please don’t try. The useful move runs the other direction: knowing your snap judgments can hinge on something this trivial should make you hold them more loosely. Next time you get an instant read on a stranger, treat it as a first guess, not a verdict — and give the person a second data point before you trust it.

    If you’re taking a psychology course, scroll down — I’ve pulled out the key concepts this research illustrates, so you can see how a real study maps onto the terms you’re studying.

    Psychology Terms in This Article

    Automatic processing — Cognitive processing that happens without conscious awareness, intention, or effort, like recognizing a familiar face. In this study, participants weren’t deliberately measuring anyone’s sclera; the judgments of trust, attractiveness, sociability, and rank formed instantly and effortlessly, which is exactly why a cue this subtle could move them.

    Evolutionary psychology — An approach that treats psychological traits as adaptations that evolved to solve recurring problems for our ancestors. The researchers use it to explain why we’d care about the white of the eye at all: highly visible sclera makes gaze-following easier (crucial for cooperation), and more white may signal youth and health — both things it would have paid off to notice.

    Peripheral route persuasion — Attitude change driven by superficial cues, such as attractiveness or surface features, rather than by the quality of any real information. The whole effect here is peripheral-route in miniature: a small change to one facial feature shifted people’s overall impression of a stranger without adding a single fact about who that person actually is.

    Confounding variable — An extra factor that varies along with the variable you’re studying, offering an alternative explanation for the result. Because increasing the visible white also slightly enlarged the eye, eye size is a confound here — the researchers can’t be fully certain whether it was the extra white or the bigger eye driving the friendlier ratings.

    References

    Boyer-Brosseau, M., Rigoulot, S., & Hétu, S. (2026). Scleral exposure influences social judgments of trustworthiness, attractiveness, sociability, and social rank in White faces. PLOS One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0348193

    Dolan, E. W. (2026, July 28). People judge faces with more visible eye whites as more trustworthy and attractive. PsyPost.

  • Why People Step Out of the Plane — and Go Back Up the Next Day

    Why People Step Out of the Plane — and Go Back Up the Next Day

    Picture standing in the open door of a plane, wind roaring, the ground a long way down. Almost every part of you is shouting one thing: do not do this. Some people hear that voice, nod, and jump anyway. And here’s the part that really gets me — after a terrible accident, some of them go back up the very next day. Why?

    That question came roaring back for me after a recent New York Times feature by Kurt Streeter and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, which opened on a single brutal weekend: a skydiving plane crash in Missouri, a fatal BASE jump near Moab, and a rope jump in Brazil where the crew forgot to clip the harness. Strip away the details and the victims all faced the same thing — a brain built to keep them safe, screaming the obvious — and each went anyway.

    I’ve actually talked about the people who do this kind of thing before. A while back I interviewed Dr. Kenneth Carter, a psychology professor at the Oxford College of Emory University and the author of the book Buzz: Inside the Minds of Thrill-Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies. He studies exactly this — and the same New York Times piece quotes him too.

    The first thing Carter told me is that “adrenaline junkie” mostly gets it wrong. The trait at the center of this is sensation seeking — the pull toward novel, varied, and intense experiences, and a willingness to take risks to get them. It traces back to Marvin Zuckerman, who discovered it almost by accident while running sensory-deprivation studies. Some people sat for hours in a quiet, blank room and felt fine; others couldn’t last minutes. No test at the time could predict who was who, so Zuckerman built one.

    Here’s the piece most people miss: high sensation seekers don’t feel the same panic you and I would. Carter’s work shows they tend to run on a different chemistry — less cortisol, the stress hormone, and more dopamine, the brain’s reward and motivation signal. So the moment that would flood you with dread becomes, for them, a moment of clarity. Time stretches, the noise drops away, and they describe picking out every crack in the rock as they fall past.

    Zuckerman’s scale breaks the trait into four parts, and I think this is the most useful way to understand it. The first two tell you what kind of seeker someone is: thrill and adventure seeking (the skydiving, the wingsuits) and experience seeking (fearless eating, far-flung travel, even striking up debates with strangers). The last two tell you how much trouble they might find: disinhibition, the tendency to leap before looking, and boredom susceptibility, how badly they need stimulation. As Carter put it to me, the danger usually isn’t the activity itself — it’s doing it impulsively. “It’s good to look before you leap,” he said, “if you’re leaping off a bridge.”

    A couple of things surprised me. Sensation seeking lines up with openness — the Big Five trait about curiosity and appetite for the new — but it is not the same as extraversion. Plenty of high seekers are quiet introverts. And I’ll admit I have skin in this game: I took Carter’s scale and scored a 13, which is low (he scored even lower, an 8). The few points I earned all came from experience seeking — I like exploring strange places. I’m also someone who gets a real jolt of nerves before stepping on stage for community theater, then loves it. Not the same as jumping off a cliff, but maybe a cousin of it.

    So what do you do with this? Two things. If you love someone who’s wired this way, understanding the trait helps — it isn’t recklessness for its own sake, and a calmer partner often becomes the “anchor” who keeps the risk in check. And if you’re the seeker, Carter’s warning is the practical gold: the trait isn’t the problem, impulsivity is. Build in the pause. Look before you leap.

    If you’re studying psychology, scroll down — I’ve pulled out the key concepts this research illustrates, in plain language you can use for an exam.

    Psychology Terms in This Article

    Sensation seeking — A personality trait describing how strongly someone is drawn to novel, varied, and intense experiences, and how much risk they’ll accept to have them. Zuckerman’s scale runs from about 8 to 40, with most people near 25; the extreme athletes in Carter’s work often score in the high 30s, which is why the same jump reads as terror to one person and joy to another.

    Dopamine — A neurotransmitter tied to reward, motivation, and the anticipation of something good. High sensation seekers appear to get a bigger dopamine payoff (with less of the stress hormone cortisol) from risky, novel situations, which helps explain why danger can feel energizing rather than frightening to them.

    Openness — One of the Big Five personality traits, marked by curiosity, imagination, and willingness to try new things. Sensation seeking correlates with openness, which is why the experience-seeking side of the trait shows up in adventurous eaters and travelers, not just cliff jumpers.

    Extraversion — The Big Five trait covering sociability and seeking stimulation from other people. The surprising research point is that sensation seeking is not reliably linked to extraversion — many high seekers are introverts — so the two traits should not be confused on an exam.

    Trait theory — The approach to personality that explains behavior through stable characteristics that show up across situations and over time. Sensation seeking is a textbook example: it’s measurable, fairly consistent within a person, and even shifts predictably with age, peaking in adolescence and easing as we get older.

    Yerkes-Dodson law — The principle that performance improves as arousal rises, but only up to a point, after which it drops — an inverted-U, with the ideal level differing by person and task. It offers a neat way to picture sensation seekers: they may need a much higher level of arousal to hit their personal sweet spot than the rest of us do.

    References

  • Why Your Favorite Playlist Eventually Bores You — and the Algorithm Is Part of the Problem

    Why Your Favorite Playlist Eventually Bores You — and the Algorithm Is Part of the Problem

    You know that feeling when Spotify hands you a song you instantly love, you play it into the ground for a week, and then somewhere around day ten you can’t stand to hear it again? That’s not just you being fickle. A new study suggests the very algorithm that found you that perfect song might be the thing quietly draining the fun out of your listening — and out of your movies, your shows, and your reading too.

    The research comes from Samsun Knight, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management who also happens to be a published novelist. His paper, “Engagement-based curation and the evolution of taste,” appeared in the Journal of Cultural Economics. Knight started wondering about this after his own odd experience with Spotify: he’d fall in love with a recommended song, and then the app would keep shoving that same song at him until he couldn’t bear it. Why, he asked, would a company that badly wants you to stay happy keep making you miserable?

    Here’s the core idea. The more you listen to a certain style of music, the better you get at appreciating it — Knight borrows the economists’ term consumption capital for this. But appreciation follows an upside-down U. A moderate amount of exposure makes you like something more. Too much exposure makes you sick of it. This is really a story about the mere exposure effect — the well-documented tendency to like things more simply because they’ve become familiar — running straight into its own limit. Familiarity builds liking, right up until it tips over into “please, anything but this.”

    Now here’s the problem Knight built a mathematical model to expose. Recommendation algorithms optimize for what keeps you clicking today. They test content over a few weeks or months. But real human taste evolves over ten or twenty years. So Knight ran simulations — a thousand separate trials — pitting different kinds of algorithmic “curators” against a simulated listener whose tastes slowly shifted over time. One curator naively assumed that high engagement just meant high quality. It never realized that its own past recommendations were the reason a song felt familiar and got clicked in the first place.

    What happened? The precise, engagement-hungry algorithm stopped exploring almost entirely. When it showed the listener something unfamiliar and got a lukewarm response, it decided that whole genre was bad and buried it. Its exploration rate dropped to zero. Then it played the safe favorites until the listener was thoroughly bored — a self-fulfilling prophecy of monotony. There’s even a name in the paper for the trap: straddling, where the system overplays a great song until you’re sick of it, while occasionally testing a mediocre one just enough to confirm it’s mediocre, never realizing that simply resting the good song would bring the joy back.

    And the punchline, the part I found genuinely surprising: a worse algorithm did better. When Knight added a little random noise — forcing the system to occasionally toss in something unfamiliar — the simulated listeners discovered new styles, built appreciation for them, and got a break from their overplayed favorites. The slightly imperfect system made people happier in the long run. His sharpest example is hip-hop. It took a lot of listeners years to learn how to hear it; early on it sounded abrasive to ears raised on rock and roll. Knight points out that if a 1980s Spotify had ranked hip-hop by people’s initial distaste, the genre might have been buried before it ever got off the ground.

    I spent years in e-learning and watched my own son disappear into video games that were engineered to keep him engaged minute by minute, and this paper put words to something I’d half-noticed for a long time. The systems that are best at giving us what we want right now can be terrible at helping us become people with bigger, richer tastes later. There’s a real difference between a tool that satisfies you and a tool that helps you grow.

    So what can you actually do with this? Be your own source of randomness. Once in a while, hand the keys to a human — a friend’s playlist, a librarian’s pick, a critic whose taste runs different from yours. Deliberately rest the songs and shows you love instead of binging them flat. And when an algorithm keeps serving you the same comfortable loop, treat that as a signal to go wander somewhere it would never send you. The boredom you’re feeling might not be a sign that there’s nothing good left — it might just be a sign that you’ve been fed the same thing one too many times.

    If you’re studying psychology, scroll down — I’ve pulled out the key concepts this research illustrates, with plain-language definitions you can use for an exam.

    Psychology Terms in This Article

    Mere exposure effect — The tendency to develop a preference for things simply because we’ve encountered them repeatedly. This study is built on the upside of that effect: the more you’re exposed to a style of music or art, the more you learn to appreciate it. The twist is that the same familiarity that builds liking eventually overshoots into boredom — so an algorithm that maximizes familiar content rides the mere exposure effect right past its sweet spot.

    Habituation (satiation) — A decrease in responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated or prolonged exposure. In the model, listeners get “sick of” a favorite song because their response to it weakens every time it’s replayed. Knight’s “straddling” trap is essentially habituation in action: the algorithm keeps replaying a great song until the listener habituates, never realizing a rest period would reset the response.

    Reinforcement — In operant conditioning, any consequence that strengthens the behavior it follows. Recommendation systems treat your clicks and plays as reinforcement signals, “rewarding” whatever you engage with by serving more of it. The paper shows the danger of a system that only follows immediate reinforcement: it optimizes for the next click while quietly narrowing the range of things you’ll ever enjoy.

    Sensation seeking — A personality trait describing the drive to pursue novel, varied, and stimulating experiences. The research highlights what gets lost when an algorithm refuses to explore: the novelty that lets tastes evolve. The “noise” that improved long-term satisfaction in the simulation is essentially a manufactured dose of novelty — the thing sensation seeking naturally pushes us toward and that over-precise systems strip away.

    References

    Knight, S. (2026). Engagement-based curation and the evolution of taste. Journal of Cultural Economics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-026-09591-3

    Reporting by Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost (June 2, 2026).

  • Does Spoiling Your Kids Actually Create Narcissists? Here’s What the Research Says

    Does Spoiling Your Kids Actually Create Narcissists? Here’s What the Research Says

    You’ve probably heard it before — maybe you’ve even said it yourself: “That kid is going to grow up to be a real handful.” We have a strong gut sense that giving children everything they want, never saying no, removing every obstacle before they can encounter it — all of that leads to something dark in adulthood. But is that actually true? And more interestingly, what specifically does it lead to?

    A new study published in Current Psychology took a careful look at exactly this question. Researchers Jennifer Vonk, Virgil Zeigler-Hill, and Nyla Griffin at Oakland University asked 720 college students to recall how their parents treated them during childhood — specifically whether their caregivers offered praise, gave them whatever they wanted (indulgence), or pushed them toward status and prestige. Then they measured something called the Dark Triad: three personality dimensions that psychologists consider socially difficult — psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism.

    What they found is striking — and the key is in the distinction between two things parents often confuse: praise and indulgence. These are not the same thing, and it turns out they lead to very different outcomes. Recalled childhood praise — being told you are valued, capable, and worthwhile — predicted lower levels of hostility, impulsivity, and cruelty in adulthood. It was associated with what the researchers call adaptive social traits: healthy confidence, social agency, and emotional stability. Praise, it seems, builds people up in a genuinely useful way.

    Recalled childhood indulgence — being given everything you asked for, having no real limits set, being treated as though rules don’t apply to you — predicted something very different. Higher psychopathic meanness. Higher narcissistic antagonism. Higher impulsivity, or what researchers call disinhibition: acting on impulses without considering consequences. The child who was never told “no” grew up with less capacity to regulate behavior and a greater tendency toward cruelty and entitlement.

    What makes this research stand out is how precisely it breaks down these personality dimensions. Rather than treating narcissism or psychopathy as a single block, the researchers measured specific facets — antagonism, emotional vulnerability, boldness, meanness — and found that indulgence and praise had opposite effects on nearly every one of them. As lead researcher Vonk told PsyPost: “The fact that high indulgence and low praise seem to predict higher levels of pathological traits… points to the importance of providing children with affirming feedback without engaging in over-indulgence.”

    I find this genuinely useful — not just as a piece of research, but as a practical distinction. We tend to think of giving kids positive experiences as one thing. But there is a real difference between affirming a child’s worth and removing every obstacle from their path. One builds self-esteem — an authentic sense of one’s own value that doesn’t depend on always getting what you want. The other builds entitlement, which is something else entirely.

    Of course, the study has limits. It relied on how adults remember their childhoods, which isn’t the same as how those childhoods actually were. Memory is reconstructive, and people high in hostile traits may simply recall their parents more negatively. The sample was also mostly white, female, and American college students — so we should be cautious about generalizing. But the pattern is consistent with what developmental psychologists have suspected for a long time.

    If you’re studying psychology, I’ve pulled out the key concepts this research illustrates — scroll down to the terms section.

    Psychology Terms in This Article

    Narcissistic personality disorder — A pattern of grandiosity, a deep need for admiration, and a lack of empathy for others. In this study, childhood indulgence predicted higher scores on narcissistic antagonism — a facet involving entitlement, hostility toward others, and exploitation. This shows how overindulgence may feed the entitlement component of narcissism without producing the full clinical disorder.

    Antisocial personality disorder — Characterized by disregard for others’ rights, impulsivity, deception, and lack of remorse. The psychopathic meanness and disinhibition facets measured in this study overlap directly with antisocial traits. The finding that indulgence predicted higher meanness and impulsivity suggests that failing to set limits during development may contribute to the callousness and poor impulse control seen in antisocial behavior.

    Self-esteem — A person’s overall evaluation of their own worth and value. The study found that parental praise predicted lower hostile traits and higher social confidence — essentially healthier self-esteem. This supports the idea that self-esteem built on authentic affirmation functions very differently from the inflated self-regard produced by overindulgence.

    Trait — A relatively stable characteristic that influences how a person thinks, feels, and behaves across situations. This study used a multi-dimensional trait approach, measuring specific facets of the Dark Triad rather than treating psychopathy or narcissism as single traits. When psychologists study personality, they increasingly break broad traits into narrower components, because different facets can have entirely different developmental origins.

    Nature-nurture issue — The long-standing debate about whether psychological characteristics are shaped more by genetic inheritance or by environmental experience. This study is firmly on the nurture side — it examines how specific parenting behaviors correlate with adult personality outcomes. That said, children’s pre-existing temperaments may influence both how parents treat them and how they recall that treatment in adulthood, which is the nature-nurture issue in action.

    Temperament — The early-appearing, biologically influenced emotional dispositions that form the foundation of personality. A child’s temperament may partly drive parenting behavior — a difficult child may elicit different parenting than an easy one. This is why correlational studies like this can’t fully separate what parents cause from what parents respond to.

    References

    Vonk, J., Zeigler-Hill, V., & Griffin, N. (2026). Praise the light, indulge the dark: Parenting strategies and dark personality traits. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09418-6

    Dolan, E. W. (2026, May 30). New study links parental indulgence to psychopathic and narcissistic traits in adulthood. PsyPost.

  • Personality Scale

    Personality Scale

    What does the way you draw a tree reveal about your personality? That’s the premise behind the Baum Test — a projective personality assessment developed by Swiss psychologist Charles Koch in 1949. The idea is deceptively simple: the choices you make when sketching a tree, the shape of the trunk, how you draw the branches, whether the roots are visible, are thought to reflect something about your inner psychological world. A colleague of mine who specializes in projective assessment has been refining an updated version of this technique and has asked for help gathering data from as many people as possible. The activity takes about three minutes. You’ll draw a single tree, and the system will generate a personality profile based on what you draw. At the end, you’ll be asked to rate how accurately the profile describes you. Give it a try.

    This activity was inspired by a post on David Webb’s substack. David is the creator of the All About Psychology website, and I thank him for allowing me to recreate the content of his Substack post into this activity.

    You are welcome to host this activity on your own site. Download the two files below. One is an HTML file that contains the majority of what you need, and the other is a Word document that steps you through how to set up the Google Sheets backend (that will hold participant data).

    forer_effect_tree_drawingDownload
    Forer-effect-teacher_setup_guideDownload