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Personality and Individual Differences-- An overviewThat people differ from each other is obvious. How and why they differ is less clear and is the subject of the scientific study of personality and individual differences. Although to study individual differences seems to be to study variance, how are people different, it is also to study central tendency, how well can a person be described in terms of an overall within-person average. Indeed, perhaps the most important question of individual differences is whether people are more similar to themselves over time and across situations than they are to others, and whether the variation within a single person across time and situation is less than the variation between people. A related question is that of similarity, for people differ in their similarities to each other. Questions of whether particular groups (e.g., groupings by sex, culture, age, or ethnicity) are more similar within than between groups are also questions of individual differences.Personality psychology addresses the questions of shared human nature, dimensions of individual differences and unique patterns of individuals. Research in IDs ranges from analyses of genetic codes to the study of sexual, social, ethnic, and cultural differences and includes research on cognitive abilities, interpersonal styles, and emotional reactivity. Methods range from laboratory experiments to longitudinal field studies and include data reduction techniques such as Factor Analysis and Principal Components Analysis, as well as Structural Modeling and Multi-Level Modeling procedures. Measurement issues of most importance are those of reliability and stability of Individual Differences. Research in Individual Differences addresses three broad questions: 1) developing an adequate descriptive taxonomy of how people differ; 2) applying differences in one situation to predict differences in other situations; and 3) testing theoretical explanations of the structure and dynamics of individual differences. These readings are a guide to recent papers in the field of individual differences. Unfortunately, only a small subset of recent research is available on the web. This is changing, but gradually. Equally unfortunately, some of the web based readings are fee based (e.g., online access to publications of the American Psychological Association). Most of the non-web accessible publications should be available at most university libraries. Of the web based research, a good deal is available by visiting the home pages of particular research laboratories. In order to make these readings easier to update, they are organized in a set of linked pages:
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The field of personality has changed a great deal in the past 20 years and the text books in the field have finally caught up with the changes. Texts are now organized around theoretical problems rather than by theorist. There are a few web based resources, and these include
Dimensional representations of personality dimensions have emphasized between three to seven fundamental dimensions. These dimensions are, in turn, used to organize research across different laboratories. Although there is strong agreement about the importance of Introversion/Extroversion and Emotional Stability, Psychoticism, the third factor in the "Giant 3", is seen as being composed of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness in the "Five Factor Model".
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