PSY100H1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12.1: Hexaco Model Of Personality Structure, Machiavellianism, Raymond Cattell
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PSY100H1 Full Course Notes
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Personality is a characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving that is unique to each individual, and remains relatively consistent over time and situations. There are 2 main broad approaches to personality measurement: the idiographic approach and the nomothetic approach. The idiographic approach focuses on creating detailed descriptions of a specific persons unique personality characteristics. The idiographic approach is trying to figure out the people you know very well. In contrast, the nomothetic approach examines personality in a large group of people, with the aim of making generalizations about personality structure. This is trying to understand the factors that predict certain behaviors across people in general. The key to nomothetic research is to identify the important personality traits that are related to whatever it is that you are interested in understanding. A personality trait describes a persons habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving; how that person is most of the time.
