PSY 260 Lecture Notes - Raymond Cattell, Gordon Allport, Lexical Hypothesis
Document Summary
Idea that people are consistent with their thoughts, actions, and feelings over time in situations: people tend to differ from one another in several dimensions. Weakness: neglects aspect of personality common to all people and their uniqueness: most research within the trait approach relies on correlational design. Nomothetic & ideographic views of traits: nomothetic (quantitative) : belief that traits exist in the same way in every person. An individual"s uniqueness arises from the combination of traits. Ideographic (qualitative) : traits are individualized and emphasizes each persons uniqueness. Can make it hard to do meaningful comparisons amongst people. Picked 18,000 words to describe personality traits. Reduced it to around 4,500 personality describing adjectives: raymond cattell (1905- 1998) Came up with 16 factors making up personality: lexical hypothesis: personality characteristics will eventually become apart of their language. Used the theoretical approach: he suggested that we start with well- developed ideas set about measuring those qualities.
