He has explored topics within: applied, economic, health, occupational, social, and differential psychology.
[4] Furnham was born on 3 February 1953 to British parents in Port Shepstone, Union of South Africa.
[3] 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.
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.
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.
[2] He has written over 70 books, and many of them have been translated into different languages, including Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
[2] He is also a regular contributor to national and international radio and television channels such as BBC, CNN, and ITV.
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.
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.
[3] Beginning early on Furnham took a great interest in self-awareness and self-estimating intelligence, in which he published many studies on.