Idiographic Traits: A Return to Allportian Approaches to Personality

Abstract

Since its beginnings, personality psychology has focused on both nomothetic and idiographic questions, but nomothetic approaches have captured the majority of attention in the past century. In this article, we demonstrate how recent measurement and modeling techniques provide an avenue for testing idiographic propositions about the dynamic features of a personality system. Findings indicate that people have unique structures of personality and that these structures are sensitive to situations people encounter. At the same time, these unique, mutable systems show longitudinal consistency for some but not all people.

The Character Strengths Response: An Urgent Call to Action

“…Non-ergodic approaches might provide new insights to complement what gets uncovered with the conventional ergodic methods used in social science. A non-ergodic approach might be especially applicable to studying the natural course of development of the character strengths across the lifespan as well as changes in character strengths, especially signature strengths, over time and conditions ( Wright and Zimmerman, 2019 : Beck and Jackson, 2020 ).…”

Capturing interactions, correlations, fits, and transactions: A Person-Environment Relations Model

“…To do so, we need to understand how persons and environments are related to each other. Indeed, different literatures acknowledge the intricate, complex, and dynamic interplay between persons and their social or non-social environments (e.g., Allport, 1961;Altman & Rogoff, 1987;Asendorpf & Rauthmann, 2020;Back et al, 2011;Balliet, Tybur, & van Lange, 2017;Baltes, 1997;Bandura, 1978Bandura, , 1982Baumert et al, 2017;Beck & Jackson, 2020;Benet-Martínez, Chapter 10;Blum & Schmitt, 2020;Bowers, 1973;Briley et al, 2019;Buss, 1987;Caspi, 1988;Caspi & Bem, 1990;Caspi, Bem, & Elder, 1989;Caspi & Roberts, 1999Craik, 1994Craik, , 2000Cramer et al, 2012;Denissen & Penke, 2008;DeYoung, 2015;Fleeson, 2012;Fleeson & Jayawickreme, 2015;Fournier, Moskowitz, & Zuroff, 2008Fraley & Roberts, 2005;Funder, 2001Funder, , 2006Funder, , 2008Funder, , 2009Hankin & Abramson, 2001;Hogan & Roberts, 2000;Holleinstein & Lougheed, 2013;Ickes, Snyder, & Garcia, 1997;Jayawickreme, Zachry, & Fleeson, 2019;Laceulle & van Aken, 2018;Laland, 2004;…”

Descriptive, Predictive and Explanatory Personality Research: Different Goals, Different Approaches, but a Shared Need to Move beyond the Big Few Traits

“…We also encourage within‐individual variance designs that focus on estimating idiographic association patterns besides nomothetic ones (Beck & Jackson, 2020; Lazarus, Sened, & Rafaeli, 2020; Wright & Zimmermann, 2019). It is crucial that we understand how far our typical nomothetic models of variance can go in principle—that is how broad are the boundary conditions of possible causal effects.…”

“…Finally, in some and maybe even many cases, links between phenomena and their plausible causes exist in such narrow circumstances as to be unique to individuals or only small subsets of them (e.g. Beck & Jackson, 2020), which further complicates connecting them with population–level variance in individual differences constructs (cf. Beltz, Wright, Sprague, & Molenaar, 2016; Dotterer, Beltz, Foster, Simms, & Wright, in press; Lazarus, Sened, & Rafaeli, 2020; Woods et al, 2020; Wright & Zimmermann, 2019).…”