ABSTRACT
We turn now to the approaches to personality which attempt to follow most closely the recognized methods of the biological sciences. They vary quite widely in their underlying assumptions: thus Allport (1961a) and Cattell (1957) agree in their desire to measure the major traits that differentiate people — traits which they conceive as determining factors or entities within the person. However, they disagree in that Allport regards this nomothetic approach as inadequate by itself — it must be supplemented by idiographic understanding of the unique organization of each individual person, whereas Cattell argues that this structure or organization can itself be measured with the aid of modern statistical techniques. At the other extreme the followers of Skinner dispense with any notion of dispositions, and are concerned simply to study the ways human beings build up their responses to stimuli. If we knew enough about the laws underlying learning, we would be able completely to control personal and social behaviour. Other psychologists think of differences between personalities in terms of groups of habitual reactions, which impress the outside observer as showing common features, rather than in terms of inner traits. Shyness, for example, is a set of withdrawing behaviours which the naïve or clinical observer — not the scientific psychologist — attributes to some personal need or disposition that cannot itself be observed. Nevertheless the different writers in this field are united in that they record and measure the characteristics of a personality in the same objective way as the physicist studies natural phenomena or the biologist lower organisms. In this sense the clinician's approach, though it can also claim to be essentially scientific, is certainly more subjective. In the light of his own subjective experience, he conceives the person as a living being who thinks and strives, not like an object or a rat.
