PSY 505 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Nomothetic, Personality Development, Personality Psychology

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 505
• Professor: Alasdair Goodwill

Document Summary

Cold reading/forer effect is not personality psychology. They are broad statements that apply to everyone--we internalise these. People want to find meaning in ambiguity--representative heuristic. Representative heuristic is assessing similarity of objects and organizing them based around the category prototype. Five goals for the personality theorist: observation that is scientific. Three key requirements for scientific observation: study large and diverse groups of people. Psychologists cannot base theories on observations of small numbers of people: objective observations. Remove any preconceptions or stereotypes that might bias one"s observation: use specialized tools to study thinking processes (scientific methods/measures, theory that is systematic. Once psychologists obtain good descriptions of personality, they can formulate a personality theory. The theory provides an explanation for what they observe. Personality theorists must relate all their ideas to one another to create theory that is systematically organized: theory that is testable. A personality psychologist must develop theoretical ideas that can be tested by objective scientific evidence--must be falsifiable.