PIGEONHOLING VERSUS APPRECIATION OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Personality psychology tends to emphasize how individuals are different from one another. A critic who wanted to be harsh could even say that personality psychology “pigeonholes” human beings. Some people are uncomfortable with measuring personality or categorizing people into types, perhaps because they find it implausible, undignified, or both.⁸

Other areas of psychology, by contrast, are more likely to treat people as if they were all the same or nearly the same. Not only do the experimental subfields of psychology, such as cognitive and social psychology, tend to ignore how people are different from each other, but also the statistical analyses central to their research literally put individual differences into their “error” terms (see Chapter 2).

But here is yet another example of a potential disadvantage working as an advantage. Although the emphasis of personality psychology often entails categorizing and labeling people, it also leads the field to be extraordinarily sensitive—more than any other area of psychology—to the fact that people really are different. We do not all like the same things, we are not all attracted to the same people (fortunately), and we do not all want to enter the same occupation or pursue the same goals in life (again, fortunately). This fact of individual differences is the starting place for all of personality psychology and gives the field a distinctive and humanistic mission of appreciating the uniqueness of each individual.⁹ People are different, and it is necessary as well as natural to wonder how and why.