PSYA02H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: Bertram Forer, Raymond Cattell, Gordon Allport

• School: UTSC
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYA02H3
• Professor: Steve Joordens

Document Summary

Personality: a characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving that is unique to each individual, and remains relatively consistent over time and situations. 2 broad approaches to personality measurement: the idiographic and the nomothetic approach. ~idiographic approach: creating detailed descriptions of specific person"s unique personality characteristics. ~nomothetic approach: examine personality in large groups of people, with the aim of making generalizations about personality structure. Personality trait: describes a person"s habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. ~short cut to understand people, summarizes a great deal of information. Lots of traits can be used to describe people. First effort to identify all traits: gordon allport (1930s); tallied 18000 english words for traits. ~developed a theory of personality structure by organizing these words into traits, launching a strong trend in personality psychology that continues to this day. Barnum effect: it is easy to convince people of their personality profile, even if completely innaccurate.