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Personality Traits

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In psychology, personality traits could be explained from many aspects, and one of them describes personality traits as categorizations of people’s particular characteristics (Burger, 1997) while others hold opposite ideas that personalities are more unique and different for each individual depending on his or her peculiar life experience. The former idea relates itself to nomothetic approach, which is a quantitative approach that studies personalities that people share in common to find out a general law that applies to everyone. The nomothetic approach suggests that people show universal traits and that personality traits are consistent within humans. Gordan Allport first brought up this approach to understand personality in 1930s, and after that, many theories has been conducted from it. Individual’s personality indicates behaviour, thus the accuracy of the indication of individual’s personality and behaviour in nomothetic approach decides the validity and effectiveness of the approach. Thus the statement that “ the nomothetic approach is the most effective way to understand an individual’s personality” can be critically evaluated by testing the validity of predictions of the theories.

As mentioned above, there are two commonly accepted approaches to understand individual’s personality. The idea that people’s personalities are unique brings the idiographic approach that investigates individuals in personal and in-depth details. According to idiographic approach, each person’s personality should be concerned with the understanding of his or her unique interpretations to reality (Grice). It is necessary to analyze the effectiveness of idiographic approach in comparison to the nomothetic approach. According to Allport, these two approaches overlap and complement each other (Allport, 1937). Idiographic approach is seen as a more complete and detailed understanding

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