Lesson 02 Commentary: Pigeonholing versus Appreciation of Individual Differences
One long-standing puzzle in personality concerns how we can describe the uniqueness of personality. Each of us is unique, but not totally unique. To paraphrase Harvard psychologists Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry Murray, each person is like
all other people,
some other people, and
no other person.
When we talk about characteristics that are common to virtually all people, we are talking about what we call human nature. For example, when psychologists say that human beings are social animals, they mean that the disposition to live with other people is a part of human nature. When we talk about a group of individuals with similar traits, we are talking about a psychological type. For example, John Holland's theory of vocational personality types says that the Artistic type describes people who are complicated, emotional, expressive, imaginative, independent, intuitive, original, and, of course, interested in creative and artistic activities.
One objection often raised about describing people in terms of human nature or psychological types is that it pigeonholes people. That is, it puts labels on people and puts them into categories. Human beings may be social animals, but aren't some people more social than others? And even though creative artists might share many common traits, to classify all of them with the category Artistic type is to ignore the even more numerous unique aspects of these individuals. So how shall we describe the uniqueness of our personality, the ways in which we are like "no other person?"
You might think that the language of personality traits might do the job. But personality trait words are labels that compare similarities as well as differences. If I say that Bob is extremely sociable, I am distinguishing him from people who are unsociable, but also describing him as similar to other extremely sociable people.
One approximation to capturing uniqueness would be to consider a person's position on a set of traits rather than one trait. If you mapped the pattern of high, average, and low scores on a personality test that measured, say, 30 different traits, it would be unlikely that others would show the exact pattern. Consider below a hypothetical example of a graph of Bob's scores on 30 different traits. What are the odds that anyone else on the planet will have exactly the same personality profile?
This solution for representing the uniqueness of personality would satisfy some, but not all, personality psychologists. Personality psychologists such as Gordon Allport, who are extremely committed to the idea of the uniqueness of personality, would say that a scheme like the one above is inadequate because (1) it compares all people on the same 30 traits instead of unique sets of traits for each individual; and (2) it is limited to only 30 out of thousands of possible traits so it can't possible capture the complete picture of Bob's uniqueness.
Nonetheless, even the approximation to uniqueness suggested above goes much further toward appreciating individuality than subfields of psychology such as cognitive and social psychology that use experiments as their primary method of investigation. For hypotheses to be supported in an experiment, the research participants must react the same way to the experimental treatment.
Differences in reaction are referred to as "error." But from the standpoint of personality psychology, individual differences in the way people react to the same situation is exactly what we want to study. Therefore, even when we use a limited number of labels to describe personality, we are much closer to studying the differences between people that define their uniqueness than what occurs in a typical experiment.