APPRECIATING INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Personality psychology emphasizes how individuals are different from one another. That’s probably my favorite thing about the field, because other areas of psychology are more likely to treat people as if they were all the same or nearly the same.⁶ 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). The experimental methods central to those other fields are most useful for insights about people in general, not in particular.

But I’m not a person in general. Are you? We’re both individuals, so is everybody else, and personality psychology is extraordinarily sensitive to that fact. People really are different. We don’t like the same things, we are not 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.⁷ People are different, and it is necessary as well as natural to wonder how and why.