The Case for an Idiothetic Psychology of Personality: A Conceptual and Empirical Foundation

Personality and social psychology: towards a synthesis

“…The basic point made in this work is that much of the controversy surrounding the two terms has resulted from the failure to distinguish between the level of methodological strategies and the level of theoretical explanation (Marceil, 1977). There seems to be a growing consensus that it is perfectly possible to employ idiographic or individual-centred methods to test nomothetic, that is, general hypotheses (Bern and Allen, 1974;Lamiell, 1982;Pervin, 1984c). This reasoning and the empirical work derived from it will be presented in detail in Chapter 7.…”

“…As the label suggests, Lamiell's (1981Lamiell's ( , 1982Lamiell's ( , 1987 'idiothetic' approach is designed to offer a perspective on personality measurement in which the aims of /d/o-graphic and nomo-thetic inquiry are integrally combined. His line of thinking can be regarded as one of the most prominent, albeit deliberately controversial, contributions recently made to the field of personality.…”

“…Fourthly, on the basis of these behaviour reports, the strength of the behavioural performance, and by implication the strength of the underlying attribute, can be expressed as the ratio between the actual number and frequency of behaviours performed and the maximum number and frequency of behaviours the person could possibly have reported on the respective instrument. In this analysis, the relevance weights attached to each behavioural criterion are taken into account on each side of the ratio (for computational details see Lamiell, 1982).…”

“…The relevance of the idiothetic approach to the study of dynamic person-situation interactions is briefly outlined by Lamiell (1982). He claims that idiothetic analysis provides a framework in which both the person and the situation are embraced simultaneously.…”

“…This means that observers contrast their observations of others' behaviour with mental negations of those observations (for example, 'what would the conclusion be if the person had not shown this behaviour?'). In a series of studies, Lamiell and his colleagues (for example, Lamiell, 1982;Lamiell, Foss, Larsen and Hempel, 1983;Lamiell, Foss, Trierweiler and Leffel, 1983) have shown that personality judgements made by naive observers can, in fact, be attributed to their reliance on dialectical reasoning. In contrast, traditional personality research is accused of inappropriately adopting a demonstrative reasoning strategy whereby observations of one person are compared with and interpreted in relation to observations of other persons' behaviour.…”