ABSTRACT
The study of personality encompassed almost all of psychology using a variety of methods, including introspection, recall, and observations of behavior in ecologically natural settings or clever laboratory situations. Personality was concerned with most of the processes that dominated the curiosity of the narrower psychological disciplines, including the evaluation of social interactions, expression of behavior and emotion, and subjective experience. Many investigations reveal a low correlation between self-reports of a personality trait and behavioral observations in relevant contexts. During the 1960s, a more positivistic empiricism began to dominate psychology as an accompaniment to the growing rejection of grand theory. Scientists studying cognition were parsing attention, memory, and perception into finer units with elegant methods that had no need to rely on introspection into subjective awareness. Although most scientific domains are characterized by increasing diversity of method as they mature, contemporary research in human personality has become less varied.
