Manhattan, Kansas, United States
David P. Schmitt is Department Head of Psychological Sciences at Oklahoma State University. He is former Director of the Centre for Culture and Evolution within Brunel University London’s College of Health, Medicine, and Life Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in personality psychology from the University of Michigan in 1995. Professor Schmitt is Founding Director of the International Sexuality Description Project, an interdisciplinary collaboration involving 100s of psychologists, biologists, and anthropologists from around the world who seek to understand how gender, culture, and personality combine to influence mental health and well-being. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 articles on human sexual diversity and his work having been cited over 23,000 times. His academic honors include receiving the Samuel Rothberg Professional Excellence Award in 2006, the Caterpillar Research Excellence Award in 2008, and in a 2013 systematic review of scholarly publications in the 2000s (published in Review of General Psychology), he was distinguished as the most frequently cited scholar within the field of cross-cultural psychology. In 2016, he was awarded the Ira and Harriet Reiss Theory Award from the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality for making important theoretical advances in sexology with his work, “The Evolution of Culturally-Variable Sex Differences.” He has served on several Editorial Boards, including Archives of Sexual Behavior, Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Psychological Science, Sexualities, Evolution & Gender: An International Journal of Feminist and Evolutionary Standpoints, and he currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the new journal, Culture and Evolution. He has been elected a member of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, is a Fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and currently serves as past-president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.
Excited to announce I am now serving as the Department Head of Psychology at Oklahoma State University! Our department has a clinical psychology PhD program, a Psychological Services Center, and a research Center for Pediatric Psychology. We also house the research-based Oklahoma Center for Evolutionary Analysis (OCEAN) and have experimental PhD programs in Cognitive, Developmental, Comparative/Neurobiological, and Social/Personality psychology. https://cas.okstate.edu/psychology
The International Sexuality Description Project (ISDP) is a research study in which sexual attitudes and behaviors were assessed across 56 nations. Founded by David P. Schmitt of Bradley University in 2000, the ISDP includes a large network of psychologists, biologists, sociologists, and other social scientists. In total, more than 100 researchers took part in the ISDP and administered anonymous sexuality and personality surveys to hundreds of men and women, typically college students. The ISDP survey was translated from English into 30 languages using a translation/back-translation procedure and was eventually administered to a total sample of over 17,000 people. The ISDP survey included measures of romantic attachment styles, global self-esteem, “Big Five” personality traits, short-term mating desires, human mate poaching behaviors, sociosexual attitudes, and the “Sexy Seven” measure of human sexuality. A follow-up study, the ISDP-2, is currently underway and includes responses from over 37,000 people across 58 nations. In this new study, we included additional measures of impression management, Dark Triad personality traits (i.e., Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and psychopathy), subjective well-being, sex-role ideology, sexual aggression, intimate partner violence, HIV/AIDS knowledge, and HIV/AIDS risk behavior. By studying nations over time, we hope to chart the many pathways of sexuality development and help to determine the cultural origins of sexuality change.
Since earning his bachelor's degree and Ph.D. in personality psychology from the University of Michigan, Dr. David P. Schmitt has authored or co-authored more than 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He also has given more than 60 presentations in the United States and throughout the world, including addresses in Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, South Korea, Switzerland, and Turkey. In addition to his active publication and presentation schedule, he is the founder and director of the International Sexuality Description Project (ISDP). The ISDP is the largest-ever cross-cultural research team, involving over 100 psychologists from nearly 60 countries around the world whose collaborative studies investigate how culture, personality and gender combine to influence sexual attitudes and behaviors. Dr. Schmitt was named a Caterpillar Professor in 2008. "As a Caterpillar Inc. Professor of Psychology, I have the opportunity to represent the many amazing teacher-scholars we have at Bradley University," Dr. Schmitt said. "In our classrooms, in our laboratories, and in our professional service, faculty members at Bradley University are movers and shakers in our respective scholarly disciplines."