Idiographic Traits: A Return to Allportian Approaches to Personality

Since its beginnings, personality psychologists have pursued both nomothetic and idiographic questions, with nomothetic approaches capturing a majority of attention in the last century. This paper demonstrates how recent measurement and modeling techniques provide an avenue for testing idiographic propositions about the dynamic features of a personality system. Findings indicate that people have unique structures of personality and that these structures are sensitive to situations people encounter. At the same time, these unique, mutable systems show longitudinal consistency for some, but not all, people.