Rate My Professor Nathan Carter

Nathan T. Carter is a Professor of Psychology in the Organizational Psychology area at Michigan State University. He earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from Bowling Green State University in 2011. Prior to joining MSU in 2022, Carter spent ten years at the University of Georgia as an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, where he advanced his research program in industrial-organizational psychology. His academic career has been marked by a commitment to rigorous psychometric methods and personality assessment applied to workplace contexts.

Carter's research specializations encompass personality and individual differences, psychometrics, the history of applied psychology, and decision-making in selection and attraction. He has pioneered applications of item response theory to personality measurement, enhancing the precision of tools for predicting work outcomes such as job performance and employee selection. Key publications include 'Testing whether the DSM-5 personality disorder trait model can be measured with a reduced set of items: An item response theory investigation of the Personality Inventory for DSM-5' (Psychological Assessment, 2015), 'Psychopathy and Machiavellianism: A distinction without a difference?' (Journal of Personality, 2017), 'A test of the International Personality Item Pool representation of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory' (Psychological Assessment, 2014), 'Placing job characteristics in context: Cross-temporal meta-analysis of changes in job characteristics since 1975' (Journal of Management, 2018), and 'Using item response theory to develop a 60-item representation of the NEO PI-R using the International Personality Item Pool' (Journal of Personality Assessment, 2019). His scholarship has garnered over 6,700 citations on Google Scholar. Carter has served as associate editor for Journal of Research in Personality and Personnel Assessment and Decisions. Notable honors include election as a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in 2023, the University of Georgia Creative Research Medal in Social and Behavioral Sciences in 2019, and designation as an Owen Institute for Behavioral Research Fellow in 2017. His contributions have advanced the measurement of personality traits and their implications for organizational behavior.