Individual Differences *exam notes*

Compare idiographic and nomothetc approach to personality.
- Two approaches to personality
o Idiographic and nomothetc
o The terms were introduced by Allport in 1937
- Idiographic defniton
o People have unique personality structure
o Some traits possessed only by one
- Nomothetc defniton
o Emphasizes comparability among individuals
o Have less/more of traits that are consistent across people
- Structure
o Nomothetc
 Psychometrics
 Behaviourism
o Idiographic
 Humanistc
 Psychoanalysis
- Psychometrics
o Cattell
 1898 – Lab of Psych – mental tests – mental ability
 wrong as not related but stll used today to evaluate hearing, vision
o Binet and Simon
 1905 – concept of mental age
o School of Military Psychology
 1917 – developed psychological tests – tested millions of recruits
 army intelligence tests had greater impact on popularisaton of psych
than Freud (Leuchtenburg, 1958)
o Ots
 1919 – multple-choice scoring – group testng possible
 commercial mental tests
o Thurstone
 1924 – basis for SATs
 1935 – multple factor analysis
o School tests
 1945 - today
o Psychometrics took over
 1950 – today
 psychological scaling, psychological measurement, factor analysis
o contributons to applied statstcs
 Jones et al., 2007
 Scaling
 Factor analysis
 First text on fundamentals of statstcs (eg. Thorndikes, 1904)
- Behaviourism
o Pavlov