# Adrian Furnham

Adrian Frank Furnham (born 3 February 1953) is a South African-born British BPS chartered occupational psychologist and chartered health psychologist. He is currently an adjunct professor at BI Norwegian Business School and a professor at University College London. Throughout his career, he has lectured in the following post-secondary institutions: Pembroke College, Oxford, University of New South Wales, University of West Indies, Hong Kong University Business School, and the Henley Management College.
Furnham has a broad range of research interests within the field of psychology. He has explored topics within: applied, economic, health, occupational, social, and differential psychology. As of 2018, he has published 92 books and over 1,200 peer-reviewed journal articles.
Furnham is a fellow of the British Psychological Society; he was granted the British Psychological Society of Academic Contribution to Practice Award in 2011.

## Early life

Furnham was born on 3 February 1953 to British parents in Port Shepstone, Union of South Africa. He was the only child of his parents. His father was a newspaper printer and publisher, and his mother was a nurse.

## Education

In 1970, at the age of sixteen, he began his university education at the University of Natal Pietermaritzburg campus, completing a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1972 and an Honors Bachelor of Arts degree in 1973, focusing on history, psychology, and theology. He completed a Master of Arts in 1974, composing his thesis on cross-cultural conformity and field dependence. In 1975, he completed an economics master's degree at the University of London, focusing his research on verbal, vocal, and visual cues and perception. He later completed a Master of Science at the University of Strathclyde, where he researched sex and class factors in the perception of social episodes. In 1981, Furnham completed a doctorate at Oxford and later received a D.Sc. from London in 1991 and a D.Litt. from Natal in 1997.

## Career

Adrian Furnham is currently a professor of psychology at University College London. Before his current placement, he had previously lectured at numerous institutes, including Pembroke College, Oxford, the University of New South Wales, and the University of the West Indies. Furthermore, he also taught management at both the Hong Kong University Business School and the Henley Management College. In 2009, he was assigned a position of adjunct professor of management at the Norwegian School of Management.
Furnham has been recognized as a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. In addition to his professorial roles at several universities, Furnham is an active member of many different associations. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, as he was renowned to be the second most productive psychologist in 1995. He is also currently the elected president of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences, as well as the founder and director of Applied Behavioral Research Associates (ABRA); which is a consultancy in psychology. Furnham's work was used at universities and other associations. He also consulted for many international companies to assist them with top team development, create systems for performance management, psychometric testing, and developing leadership skills. Following these experiences, he was elected Fellow of the Leadership Trust in 2010, Academician of the Learned Society of the Social Sciences in 2010, and British Psychological Society of Academic Contribution to Practice Award in 2011.
He has written over 92 books, and many of them have been translated into different languages, including Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Alongside his books, Furnham has written newspaper pieces for Financial Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Daily Mail, Times Higher Education Supplement, Sunday Times, and contributed to various magazines, including: The Spectator, Personnel Management, New Scientist, Across the Board, and Spotlight, in both Europe and North America. He has been a columnist in multiple management magazines such as Mastering Management and Human Resources. He is also a regular contributor to national and international radio and television channels such as BBC, CNN, and ITV.

## Research
### Themes
#### Psychometric housekeeping and reviews

Furnham has documented different scales that measure the same thing and compared their quantities. He did this through reviewing old and new personality tests. Some examples of his extensive reviews are Tolerance of Ambiguity (co-authored by Ribchester and Marks), Belief in a Just World, and the Protestant Work Ethic.

#### Test development

Furnham has developed several tests throughout his career. He adapted already existing ideas to make specific tests like the Economic Locus of Control measure in 1986, and the Organisational Attributional Style Questionnaire in 1992. He developed the Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire, which is a self-report inventory that measures the sampling domain of trait emotional intelligence, along with his PhD student Dino Petrides in 2006. He also developed the High Flyer Trait Inventory (formerly High Flying Personality Inventory), with his colleague Ian Macrae in 2014. The High Flyer Trait Inventory is a measure of personality traits directly related to workplace behaviours, thoughts, and perceptions of oneself and others.

#### The relationship between tests of preference and power

To this day Furnham had been interested in the distant relationship between the two pillars differential psychology. Furnham had given his opinion on this topic to the International Society for the Study of Individual differences. He works on this topic with the help of his PhD students.

#### Self-appraisal and awareness

Beginning early on Furnham took a great interest in self-awareness and self-estimating intelligence, in which he published many studies on. The findings of his studies revealed that males tend to estimate their general intelligence 5-15 IQ points higher than females do, these sex differences occur across the generations and that sex differences are cross-culturally consistent.

#### Dark side

Furnham was introduced to the dark side personality by Robert Hogan. Dark side personalities are those that portray dysfunctional behaviours and beliefs towards others. For instance, Psychopaths would fall under this category. These types of people do not consider how their actions affect their reputation, and, although this may seem like deviant behaviour, it also seems to help them people climb up the corporate ladder. Dark side personality research was based on the DSM-III. Using the Hogan Development Survey in various studies, Furnham was able to collect sufficient amounts of data, which later on aided in studying misbehaviour at work. According to the HDS, mischievous people were considered to be extraverts, disagreeable, deliberate, and stable. They scored high on the excitement scale and low on the consciousness scale. Furnham has written multiple papers as well as two books on this topic.

## Publications
### Books

As of 2019, he has written over 92 books and over 1200 scientific papers, including:
* 1990 The Protestant Work Ethic
* 1994 Culture Shock
* 1994 Personality at Work
* 1995 The New Economic Mind
* 1996 The Myths of Management
* 1997 The Psychology of Behaviour at Work
* 1998 The Psychology of Money
* 2003 The Incompetent Manager
* 2004 The Dark Side of Behaviour at Work
* 2005 The People Business
* 2006 Management Mumbo-Jumbo
* 2007 Head and Heart Management
* 2008 Management Intelligence
* 2009 50 Psychology Ideas you really need to know
* 2009 The Elephant in the Boardroom: The Psychology of Leadership Derailment
* 2012 The Talented Manager
* 2015 High Potential
* 2017 Motivation and Performance

## Awards and achievements

* 2010 Elected Fellow of the Leadership Trust
* 2010 Elected Academician of the Learned Society of the Social Sciences
* 2011 British Psychological Society Academic Contribution to Practice Award
* 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award