PSYC 2P25 Lecture Notes - Nomothetic, Probability Distribution, Heredity
9 Nov 2012
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How does personality affect life outcomes (e. g. health, happiness, career, law, relationships, etc. Idiographic approach: try to understand each individual"s complex, unique features. Might give ideas of how the personality works. But, it"s inefficient -> would take too long to study many people in this way (hundreds or thousands of people would need to be studied for this method) Also, doesn"t give a way to test ideas about personality: nomothetic approach: try to understand all people in terms of personality variables. By measuring many people, 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. If we measure people on a characteristic, we (obviously) want our measurements to show which people have higher and lower levels of the characteristic (e. g. musical ability)
