PSYC1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Gordon Allport, Nomothetic
19 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Personality and theory evaluation
Personality
• From latin "persona", meaning mask
• Nomothetic and idiographic focus
o Nomothetic
• Laws in personality that apply to all human beings
o Idiographic
• Aims to account for someone's uniqueness, individuality
• Most personality theories try to focus on uniqueness and individuality within general laws
about human behaviour
o Need to observe psychological processes common to all people and individual behaviour
Gordon Allport
• Personality is a dynamic organisation within the individual of those psychophysical systems
that determine his unique adjustments to his environment
What is a theory?
• Number of descriptive statements, often hypothetical in nature, which are organised to
constitute a theory
• Function - is to explain a phenomenon, to make predictions which can be tested empirically
and conceptually
Approaches to personality theory
• Psychoanalytic/psychodynamic
o Classical e.g. Freud, Jung
• Cognitive-behavioural
• Humanistic/phenomenological/existential
• Dispositional
o Trait approach
Evaluating theories
• Conceptually
• Empirically - data, in lab, controlled conditions and observations
Evaluation Criteria
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