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.