Rate My Professor Rand Montoya

Rand Montoya is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. His academic career includes prior affiliation with the Department of Psychology at the University of Dayton. Montoya's research specializes in social psychology, focusing on interpersonal attraction, the similarity-attraction effect, behavioral expressions of attraction and trust, personality assessment including narcissistic grandiosity, and statistical methods for assessing evidential value in psychological research such as p-curve analysis. His work employs meta-analytic techniques to synthesize empirical findings, providing clarity on effect sizes, moderators, and theoretical mechanisms underlying social phenomena.

Montoya has authored several influential publications. Notable among them is 'A meta-analytic investigation of the processes underlying the similarity-attraction effect' (2013, co-authored with Robert S. Horton), which has been cited over 500 times and elucidates how similarity influences interpersonal attraction. In 2014, he published 'A Two-Dimensional Model for the Study of Interpersonal Attraction' (Personality and Social Psychology Review, with Robert S. Horton), cited nearly 200 times, introducing a framework distinguishing affective and cognitive components of attraction. Other key works include 'A meta-analytic investigation of the relation between interpersonal attraction and enacted behavior' (2018, Psychological Bulletin), examining behavioral outcomes of attraction; 'Further exploring the relation between uncertainty and attraction' (with C.M. Faiella and B.P. Lynch); 'The Narcissistic Grandiosity Scale: A Measure to Assess Narcissistic Grandiosity' (2020, Journal of Personality Assessment, with S.A. Rosenthal et al.); 'Understanding the attraction process' (2020, Social and Personality Psychology Compass); 'The inconsistency of p-curve: Testing its reliability using the power pose and HPA debates' (2024, PLoS ONE, with Christine Kershaw and Christopher Jurgens); and 'An interdisciplinary investigation into the behaviors that build (and express) interpersonal trust' (2025, with Brandon Porter). These contributions have shaped methodological rigor and theoretical advancements in social psychology, influencing studies on relationships, personality, and research validity.