Assumptions About Personality and Core Motivations as Hidden Partners in Social Psychology

I am a personality psychologist. Most people know that personality psychologists study individual differences. Many believe-incorrectly-that we care only about individual differences. Personality psychologists focus partly on things that make people different from each other, but partly on things that make people the same-normative structures and processes that coalesce to form a unique personality in every normal human being. In our textbook (Carver & Scheier, 2004), we use the term intrapersonal functioning to refer to these processes. Allport (1961), more eloquently, termed them a dynamic organization of psychological systems within each person that create the person’s pattern of behaviors, thoughts, and feelings.