PS271 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Nomothetic, Gordon Allport
Document Summary
Trait psychologists identify a wide range of behaviours that can be represented along the continuum. A trait is a dimension of personality used to categorize people according to the degree to which they manifest a particular characteristic. The trait approach assumes that over many different situations a relatively stable average degree of aggressiveness can be determined. Trait theorists include people who study individual differences in needs and strategies, among other concepts: the psychologists is interested in relatively stable patterns of behaviour that can be measured and categorized along a normal distribution. Not interested in predicting one person"s behavior in a given situation. People with high in social anxiety make more eye contact than those low on this trait. They aren"t only interested in describing traits: they examine the process that are associated with a particular trait, they don"t say a lot about personality change. A method of understanding personality that compares many people along the same personality dimensions.
