In this video I introduce the concept of personality and two main approaches to studying it; a nomothetic approach and an idiographic approach. I also briefly describe the history of considering biological explanations for why people differ.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous videos we’ve been looking at intelligence in great detail and hopefully what you’ve gotten from this is you’ve seen the level of complexity that’s involved in trying to understand a single trait. So we have difficulties in defining a single trait then we have difficulties in assessing that trait in a way that’s valid and reliable. And then we have the question of what’s causing differences in this trait between different people? And then we have an additional question of how do we interpret these differences? How do we make sense of them? So hopefully all of this has prepared you to investigate other traits.
So this is going to bring us to the study of personality. Now, we might ask what is personality? Just like intelligence, you probably have a common sense understanding of the term but we’re going to need to have a more precise definition. So we can say that people differ, that seems obvious. There are differences between people and when we think about personality what we’re really referring to is that people have unique and characteristic patterns to their thinking, feeling, and behaving. And we want these patterns to be consistent across situations because when we find a pattern that’s consistent, that means it’s something about the person. It’s not the situation that’s causing those behaviors. So how can we go about measuring personality? How can we measure these patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving?
Well, there’s two main approaches that we can adopt. The first of these is called a nomothetic approach and so this comes from the Greek “nomos” for law and what we’re doing in a nomothetic approach to personality is we’re trying to uncover the universal laws of personality. So what do I mean by that? Well, the idea is if you find something universal about personality then it applies to all people. So you can investigate parts of personality that you think everyone shares to some degree or another. So I might think about something like a level of introversion. I might say, well, everybody has to interact with other people and some people are more outgoing and some people are more withdrawn and so everybody has this to some degree. And we can think about how people differ for this sort of overall dimension. That would be a nomothetic approach to thinking about personality.
On the other hand, we can adopt an idiographic approach and what an ideographic approach does is it looks for the unique aspects that aren’t necessarily shared with other people. So I could focus on a particular individual and say, what are the unique things about his or her personality that I don’t see in other people, right? The peculiarities of this particular person and you can think about studying a person’s idiosyncrasies because it’s derived from the same root which refers to sort of “private” or something that is someone’s own aspects so that would be an idiographic approach and we’ll see some examples of that in future videos.
Now when we think about these differences between people we might think about what’s causing these differences for different traits. And this brings us to biological aspects of personality. Now the history of thinking about how biological differences between people might influence their personality goes back very far. We can trace it all the way back to Hippocrates who lived from 460 to 370 BC. Hippocrates suggested that people had different humors and so he thought there were four humors that influenced people and these were blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. So the idea is that people have different levels of these different humors and that’s part of the reason why there are differences between people. Galen took Hippocrates’ work, and Galen lived from about 129 to 216 AD, and he adopted this to define four different personality types based on high levels of a particular humor. So the idea was if you have a high level of blood then you’d be described as “sanguine” and this refers to somebody who’s optimistic, upbeat, cheerful. If they have a high level of yellow bile thought this makes somebody “choleric” and this referred to somebody who is sort of irritable and bad-tempered. If you have a high level of black bile, on the other hand, that makes you “melancholic” and this refers to somebody who’s gloomy and sad and depressed. And lastly if you had a high level of phlegm then that would make you “phlegmatic” and this refers to somebody who is very even-tempered, very calm and cool.
Now I bring up these humors and these personality types associated with them not because people still think this way, we’re not going to actually consider that this is really the explanation for personality differences, but to give you an idea of the possibility of how we think about biological roots, biological differences between people and how those might relate to how their personalities are expressed.
So we will see modern equivalents of this approach, we’ll see modern physiological approaches to studying how differences in the nervous system might relate to differences in certain personality traits. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
