PSYC 2P25 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Nomothetic, Physical Attractiveness, Probability Distribution
4 Feb 2016
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Idiographic approach: try to understand each individual"s complex, unique features. But it"s inefficient > would take too long to study many people in. Also, doesn"t give a way to test ideas about personality. Nomothetic approach: try to understand all people in terns of personality variables. By measuring many people we can see how variables are inter- related> and can test ideas about personality in general (not just for one person) To test ideas about personality, we need to measure the personalities of many people, and then analyze and compare the measurements. But regardless of how we measure personality we want our measurements to have certain properties. If we measure people on a characteristic, we (obviously) want our measurements to show which people have higher and lower levels of the characteristic. But also, we want our measurements to show how big are the.
