PSYCH101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Bertram Forer, Trait Theory, Behaviorism

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH101
• Professor: Paul Wehr

Document Summary

Personality is a characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving that is unique to each individual, and remains relatively consistent over time and situations. There are two broad approaches to personality measurement: When you try to figure out the people you know very well, you intuitively adopt an idiographic approach focusing on creating detailed descriptions of a specific person"s unique personality characteristics. Trying to find out why bobby is so weird. Are helpful not only for understanding yourself and your social world, but also can be applied to full range of human experience, from the most disturbed to the healthiest and most highly functioning individuals: ex. Criminal profilers may focus on a detailed study of a serial killer in order to help police in their investigation. Nomothetic approach examine personality in large groups of people, with the aim of making generalizations about personality structure.