Mitja D Back

Mitja D Back
University of Münster | WWU · Department of Psychology

About

305
Publications
356,327
Reads
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12,153
Citations
Additional affiliations
April 2005 - March 2009
Leipzig University
Position
  • Research Assistant
April 2012 - present
University of Münster
April 2010 - March 2012
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Position
  • Junior Professor

Publications

Publications (305)
Article
Right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA) refers to an adherence to conventional values and authorities with the power to penalize groups that are perceived to challenge the cohesion of ingroup norms. Correspondingly, RWA has repeatedly been linked to negative perceptions of minoritized groups, such as refugees or religious minorities. To investigate wheth...
Preprint
Full-text available
The experience sampling method (ESM) and comparable assessment approaches are increasingly becoming popular tools for well-being research. In part, they are so popular because they represent more direct approaches for assessing individuals’ experienced well-being during a specified period, whereas one-time, retrospective evaluations of that episode...
Article
Full-text available
The Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale (HSNS) is a an economical, widely used self-report measure of vulnerable narcissism. Developed and mostly used as a unidimensional scale, previous structural examinations suggest two correlated dimensions, one emphasizing hypersensitive/neurotic aspects and the other highlighting egocentric/antagonistic aspects o...
Article
Full-text available
Interpersonal judgments play a central role in human social interactions, influencing decisions ranging from friendships to presidential elections. Despite extensive research on the accuracy of these judgments, an overreliance on broad personality traits and subjective judgments as criteria for accuracy has hindered progress in this area. Further,...
Article
Full-text available
Social skills (e.g., assertiveness, empathy, ability to accept criticism) are essential for the medical profession and therefore also for the selection and development of medical students. However, the term “social skills” is understood differently in different contexts. There is no agreed upon taxonomy for classifying physicians’ social skills, an...
Article
Full-text available
Although Assessment Center (AC) role‐play assessments have received ample attention in past research, their reliance on actual behavioral information is still unclear. Uncovering the behavioral basis of AC role‐play assessments is, however, a prerequisite for the optimization of existing and the development of novel automated AC procedures. This wo...
Preprint
Response Surface Analysis (RSA) allows researchers to study whether the degree of congruence between two predictor variables is related to a potential psychological outcome. Here, we adapt RSA to the case in which the two predictor variables whose congruence is of interest refer to individual differences in within-person associations (WPAs) between...
Preprint
Although Assessment Center (AC) role-play assessments have received ample attention in past research, their reliance on actual behavioral information is still unclear. Uncovering the behavioral basis of AC role-play assessments is, however, a prerequisite for the optimization of existing and the development of novel automated AC procedures. This wo...
Article
Full-text available
Härtel, T. M., & Back, M. D. (2024). From bullet points to personality insights: What’s hiding in your resumé? The Brunswik Society Newsletter (ISSN 2296-9926), 39, 33-36. https://brunswiksociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/2024-Brunswik-Society-Newsletter.pdf. Recruiters often prioritize personality when making hiring decisions, with resumé sc...
Article
Full-text available
Response surface analysis is a statistical tool that is used, for example, to study whether the degree of congruence between two person-level trait variables relates to a third variable (e.g., whether romantic couples whose partners have similar personality trait levels are happier than incongruent couples). A complementary perspective on congruenc...
Article
Full-text available
Recent efforts in a range of scientific fields have emphasised research and methods concerning individual differences and individualisation. This article brings together various scientific disciplines—ecology, evolution, and animal behaviour; medicine and psychiatry; public health and sport/exercise science; sociology; psychology; economics and man...
Preprint
Full-text available
Recent efforts in a range of scientific fields have emphasised research and methods concerning individual differences and individualisation. This article brings together various scientific disciplines—ecology, evolution, and animal behaviour; medicine and psychiatry; public health and sport/exercise science; sociology; psychology; economics and man...
Article
Full-text available
Recruiters routinely use LinkedIn profiles to infer applicants' individual traits like narcissism and intelligence, two key traits in online network and organizational contexts. However, little is known about LinkedIn profiles' predictive potential to accurately infer individual traits. According to Brunswik's lens model, accurate trait inferences...
Article
Full-text available
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 participant...
Article
Full-text available
The current registered report investigated whether individuals high in narcissistic rivalry are more likely to attain status when they have the opportunity to punish uncooperative group members than when they have the opportunity to share their resources with others. We conducted a lab-based behavioral experiment (N = 644) in which groups of seven...
Preprint
The current registered report investigated whether individuals high in narcissistic rivalry are more likely to attain status when they have the opportunity to punish uncooperative group members than when they have the opportunity to share their resources with others. We conducted a lab-based behavioral experiment (N = 644) in which groups of seven...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
Mental health research faces the challenge of developing machine learning models for clinical decision support. Concerns about the generalizability of such models to real-world populations due to sampling effects and disparities in available data sources are rising. We examined whether harmonized, structured collection of clinical data and stringen...
Article
Full-text available
Social media impacts people’s wellbeing in different ways, but relatively little is known about why this is the case. Here we introduce the construct of “social media sensitivity” to understand how social media and wellbeing associations differ across people and the contexts in which these platforms are used. In a month-long large-scale intensive l...
Article
Narcissistic individuals have a strong desire for attracting short-term mates, being influential in groups, and attaining prestige and material wealth. Past research suggests that narcissistic individuals are also quite successful in attaining these outcomes and these effects are due to narcissists’ grandiose self-image and admiration-seeking tende...
Article
Full-text available
The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, has had devastating effects on the Ukrainian population and the global economy, environment, and political order. However, little is known about the psychological states surrounding the outbreak of war, particularly the mental well-being of individuals outside Ukraine. Here, we present a longitu...
Article
Full-text available
Whereas grandiose narcissism has generally been found to be related to adaptive affective experiences (i.e., positive affective states), many theoretical conceptualizations have emphasized its associations with characteristics of low affective well-being (i.e., unstable, highly variable affective states). Empirical research on the association of gr...
Preprint
The experience sampling method (ESM) and comparable assessment approaches are increasingly becoming popular tools for well-being research. In part, they are so popular because they represent more direct approaches for assessing individuals’ experienced well-being during a specified period, whereas one-time, retrospective evaluations of that episode...
Article
Full-text available
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 investig...
Article
Full-text available
Assessing the psychological characteristics of job applicants—including their vocational interests or personality traits—has been a corner stone of hiring processes for decades. While traditional forms of such assessments require candidates to self-report their characteristics via questionnaire measures, recent research suggests that computers can...
Article
Full-text available
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 a...
Preprint
Interpersonal judgments play a central role in human social interactions, influencing decisions ranging from friendships to presidential elections. Despite extensive research on the accuracy of these judgments, an overreliance on broad personality traits and subjective judgments as criteria for accuracy has hindered progress in this area. Further,...
Article
Full-text available
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 mor...
Preprint
Full-text available
Assessing the psychological characteristics of job applicants - including their vocational interests or personality traits – has been a corner stone of hiring processes for decades. While traditional forms of such assessments require candidates to self-report their characteristics via questionnaire measures, recent research suggests that computers...
Article
Full-text available
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 interact...
Article
A long tradition of research has focused on the association between narcissism and perfectionism. The current research investigates this association by differentiating between assertive and antagonistic aspects of grandiose narcissism, as described in the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept. Participants (n = 402) completed the Narcissistic...
Article
Full-text available
Status pursuit has been emphasized as a key motivational factor underlying narcissism, but research has just begun to unravel the processes by which more narcissistic individuals pursue status in their everyday social interactions. In this article, we combine process models of narcissistic status pursuit with three-factor models of narcissism to te...
Article
This study uses process models of personality to examine the behavioral pathways that explain personality traits’ divergent relation to leadership outcomes in social groups. We applied data from an online group interaction study (N = 364) alternately assigning participants as leaders conducting brief group tasks. We used four types of variables to...
Article
Recruiters routinely use LinkedIn profiles to infer applicants’ key personality traits like narcissism and intelligence. However, little is known about LinkedIn profiles’ predictive potential to accurately infer personality. According to Brunswik’s lens model, accurate personality inferences depend on (a) the presence of valid cues in LinkedIn prof...
Article
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 disadvant...
Article
Full-text available
We present a global experience‐sampling method (ESM) study aimed at describing, predicting, and understanding individual differences in well‐being during times of crisis such as the COVID‐19 pandemic. This international ESM study is a collaborative effort of over 60 interdisciplinary researchers from around the world in the “Coping with Corona” (Co...
Preprint
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 meta-perceiver” is relevant given the beneficial outcomes of meta-accuracy. However, there likely is more than one type of the good meta-perceiver: one who knows the specific impressions they make m...
Preprint
We present a global experience-sampling method (ESM) study aimed at describing, predicting, and understanding individual differences in well-being during times of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This international ESM study is a collaborative effort of over 60 interdisciplinary researchers from around the world in the “Coping with Corona” (Co...
Conference Paper
This study uses process models of personality to examine the behavioral pathways that explain personality traits' divergent relation to leadership outcomes in social groups. We applied data from an online group interaction study (N = 364) alternately assigning participants as leaders conducting brief group tasks. We used four types of variables to...
Article
Full-text available
Age and gender differences in narcissism have been studied often. However, considering the rich history of narcissism research accompanied by its diverging conceptualizations, little is known about age and gender differences across various narcissism measures. The present study investigated age and gender differences and their interactions across e...
Preprint
Full-text available
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 interact...
Preprint
Full-text available
Recent trends in a range of scientific fields have seen a shift towards research and methods concerning individual differences and individualisation. This article brings together various scientific disciplines—ecology, evolution, and animal behaviour; medicine and psychiatry; public health and sport/exercise science; sociology; psychology; economic...
Preprint
Full-text available
Status pursuit has been emphasized as a key motivational factor underlying narcissism, but research has just begun to unravel the processes by which more narcissistic individuals pursue status in their everyday social interactions. In this manuscript, we combine process models of narcissistic status pursuit with three-factor models of narcissism to...
Article
Full-text available
To examine psychological responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted two large experience sampling (ESM) studies (Study 1: NESM participants = 327 and NESM reports = 29,512, Study 2: NESM participants = 2,272 and NESM reports = 64,810). Each study subsumed two 14-day ESM waves that took place before and during (Study 1) or during and after (St...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background/Objective: A detrimental impact of narcissistic personality traits on depressive symptomatology, therapeutic alliance, and treatment outcome, even in the absence of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), has been theorized. However, the evidence base in clinical settings is lacking. As research classification systems such as the ICD-11...
Article
Full-text available
A central assumption in lay and psychological theories is that people are attracted to potential mates who are similar to themselves in personality traits. However, the empirical findings on this idea have been inconclusive. Only a few studies have considered real-life dating contexts, and the statistical approaches they applied have sometimes spur...
Article
Success as a dancer is closely associated with positive dance judgments by perceivers. Although dancers' physical appearance (attractiveness, style) might affect dance judgments beyond dance-specific attributes (technique, expression), they have largely been unconsidered in previous studies. To contribute to a comprehensive explanation of real-life...
Preprint
Full-text available
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 investig...
Chapter
Psychological states as the basis of human behavior can be explained by person variables, by aspects of a situation, or by the interplay between person and situation. This chapter first provides an introduction to basic psychological approaches to explaining person effects and situational influences. For this purpose, typical person and situation e...
Preprint
Full-text available
Age and gender differences in narcissism have been studied often. However, considering the rich history of narcissism research accompanied by its diverging conceptualizations, little is known about age and gender differences across various narcissism measures. The present study investigated age and gender differences and their interactions across e...
Preprint
Research on the effects of social media on wellbeing has been equivocal. Social media impacts people’s wellbeing indifferent ways, but relatively little is known about why this is the case. Here we introduce the construct of “Social Media Sensitivity” to understand how social media’s effects on wellbeing differs across people and the contexts in wh...
Article
The current study investigates the longitudinal association between grandiose narcissism and multidimensional perfectionism over 2 years in adolescence. We adopted the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept, which differentiates between two aspects of grandiose narcissism. We also considered multiple dimensions of perfectionism, including Soci...
Article
Full-text available
Personality and social relationships influence each other in multiple and consequential ways. To understand how people differ from each other in their personality and social behavior, how these differences develop, and how this affects further life outcomes, we need to better understand the interplay of personality and social relationships. Here, w...
Article
Full-text available
We introduce a novel approach to assess habitual comparison processes, while distinguishing between different types of comparison standards. Several comparison theories (e.g., social) suggest that self-evaluations use different standards to inform self-perception and are associated with wellbeing and personality. We developed the Comparison Standar...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we introduce multi-modal Social Relations Analysis as a powerful tool for studying personality pathology that tackles several important limitations of existing research. By implementing a design in which groups of participants provide repeated ratings as they interact, researchers can gather data on individuals' mutual perceptions, a...
Article
Full-text available
A plentitude of research has analyzed citizens’ belief in conspiracy theories and its individual‐level correlates. Yet, the effects of (political) context factors on the causes and effects of individual belief in conspiracy theories are still neglected. However, such context should be especially relevant when it comes to the impact of one’s belief...
Article
Full-text available
Conspiracy mentality (CM), the general propensity to believe in conspiracy theories, has been linked to political behaviors, prejudice, and non‐compliance with public health guidelines. While there is increasing evidence that conspiracy beliefs are pervasive, research on individual‐level predictors of CM is scarce. Specifically, we identify three g...
Article
Full-text available
In education, among the most anticipated consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are that student performance will stagnate or decline and that existing inequities will increase. Although some studies suggest a decline in student performance and widening learning gaps, the picture is less clear than expected. In this study, we add to the existing lit...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Article
Full-text available
Condition-based regression analysis (CRA) is a statistical method for testing self-enhancement effects. That is, CRA indicates whether, in a set of empirical data, people with higher values on the directed discrepancy self-view S minus reality criterion R (i.e., S-R) tend to have higher values on some outcome variable (e.g., happiness). In a critic...
Article
Full-text available
Social skills are of key importance in everyday and work life. However, the way in which they are typically assessed via self-report questionnaires has one potential downside; self-reports assess individuals’ global self-concepts, which do not necessarily reflect individuals’ actual social behaviors. In this research, we aimed to investigate how se...
Preprint
Full-text available
Social skills are of key importance in everyday and work life. However, the way in which they are typically assessed via self-report questionnaires has one potential downside; self-reports assess individuals’ global self-concepts, which do not necessarily reflect individuals’ actual social behaviors. In this research, we aimed to investigate how se...
Article
Full-text available
Decades of research show that people's social lives are linked to their well-being. Yet, research on the relationship between social interactions and well-being has been largely inconclusive with regard to the effects of person-situation interactions, such as the interplay between contextual factors (e.g., interactions occurring in physical vs. dig...
Preprint
Condition-based regression analysis (CRA) is a statistical method for testing self-enhancement (SE) effects. That is, CRA indicates whether, in a set of empirical data, people with higher values on the directed discrepancy S R (self-view S minus reality criterion R) tend to have higher values on some outcome variable (e.g., happiness). In a critica...
Preprint
Full-text available
A central assumption in lay and psychological theories is that people are attracted to potential mates who are similar to themselves in personality traits. However, the empirical findings on this idea have been inconclusive. Only a few studies have considered real-life dating contexts, and the statistical approaches they applied have sometimes spur...
Article
On the basis of the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivalry Concept and recent theories on narcissistic pursuit of status, we provide a differentiated analysis of individual differences in the within-person dynamics of grandiose narcissism. In two daily diary studies (Sample 1: 56 days; Sample 2: 82 days; total participants: N = 198; total observations...
Preprint
In this paper, we introduce multi-modal Social Relations Analysis as a powerful tool for studying personality pathology that tackles several important limitations of existing research. By implementing a design in which groups of participants provide repeated ratings as they interact, researchers can gather data on individuals' mutual perceptions, a...
Article
Full-text available
Real-life social interactions occur in continuous time and are driven by complex mechanisms. Each interaction is not only affected by the characteristics of individuals or the environmental context but also by the history of interactions. The relational event framework provides a flexible approach to studying the mechanisms that drive how a sequenc...
Article
Full-text available
Although the behaviors displayed by assessees are the currency of assessment centers (ACs), they have remained largely unexplored. This is surprising because a better understanding of assessees’ behaviors may provide the missing link between research on the determinants of assessee performance and research on the validity of performance ratings. Th...
Article
Full-text available
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...
Preprint
Full-text available
Decades of research show that people’s social lives are linked to their well-being. Yet, research on the relationship between social interactions and well-being has been largely inconclusive with regard to the effects of person-situation interactions, such as the interplay between contextual factors (e.g., interactions occurring in physical vs. dig...
Preprint
Although the behaviors displayed by assessees are considered to be the currency of assessment centers (ACs), they have remained largely unexplored. This is surprising because a better understanding of assessees’ behaviors may provide the missing link between research on the determinants of assessee performance and research on the validity of perfor...
Article
Full-text available
Narcissism is a multifaceted construct commonly conceptualized as comprising grandiose and vulnerable aspects in a two-factor model. While the manifold correlates of these aspects imposed a challenge for research on the structure of narcissism, recent models converge in a three-factor structure of agentic-extraverted, antagonistic, and neurotic asp...