Chapter 1

Introduction to individual
differences

Introduction
Most branches of psychology examine how people (or animals) behave in different settings
or under different experimental conditions: they assume that people are all much the same.
Thus when developmental psychologists talk about ‘stages of development’, the tacit
assumption is that all children develop in broadly similar ways. Likewise, social psychology
produces theories to explain why people in general may show obedience to authority, prejudice
and other group-related behaviours. Cognitive psychologists have shown that people recognise
the meaning of a word more quickly when it is preceded by a semantically related ‘prime’.
Physiological psychologists often assume that everyone’s nervous system has much the same
sort of structure and will operate in much the same way. So much of psychology involves
fnding rules that describe how people in general behave.
Yet this is only part of the story, for there is also signifcant variation between people. Some
of this variation is random; people will behave differently on different occasions for reasons
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which are not clear. However some of the variations will be systematic. Some individuals are
more obedient to authority or more prejudiced than others. Some people will recognise all
types of words quickly while others will take far longer. Some will be more anxious than
others, whatever the situation. The psychology of individual differences seeks to understand
two things. It frst explores the ways in which people vary psychologically – using terms such
as ‘anxiety’ or ‘intelligence’. Second, it develops theories to explain how and why such
variations in behaviour come about. Do these individual differences in anxiety or intelligence
arise from the way in which children developed, their genetic makeup or the family environment
which they experienced during childhood? Or are variations in physiological makeup, such
as the extent and depth of the wrinkles on the surface of the brain or the amount of activity
in the autonomic nervous system, linked to any of these characteristics? The possibilities are
endless.

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 Introduction to individual differences

Given that the aim of psychology is to describe, explain and predict the behaviour of
organisms (people), it is clearly necessary to understand both the setting in which the behaviour
occurs, the general laws and relevant individual differences. For example, in order to predict
whether a jailed psychopath will re-offend if released, it is necessary to understand both the
general law (the statistical probability that a jailed psychopath taken at random will re-offend),
and individual differences that are related to re-offending behaviour (for example, the extent
to which the person shows remorse or empathy for their victims). This book focuses on
individual differences.

Learning outcomes
Having read this chapter you should be able to:
l Discuss why it is important to study individual differences, and how it
differs from other areas of psychology.
l Outline how individual differences may be discovered.
l Appreciate why it is necessary to determine how people vary (‘structural
models’) and the lower-level processes which cause these variations to
occur (‘process models’) to have a proper understanding of individual
differences.

I believe that there are four main reasons for studying individual differences:

l It is of interest in its own right. Most of us believe that personality, intelligence and so on
are important characteristics of people when making friends and seeking partners – perhaps
enduring music which we dislike, boring parties and dating apps rather than simply
marrying the person next door. But how should we conceptualise their personality? What
characteristics of a person should we look for?
l Psychological tests are useful in applied psychology. The study of individual differences
almost invariably leads to the publication of psychological tests. These measure abilities,
knowledge, personality, mood and many other characteristics. They are of immense value
to educational, occupational and clinical psychologists, teachers, nurses, careers counsellors
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and others who may want to diagnose learning diffculties, dyslexia or outstanding mental
ability or seek to assess an individual’s suitability for promotion, level of depression or
suitability for a post that requires enormous attention to detail. The proper use of
psychological tests can thus beneft both society and individuals.
l Tests are useful ‘dependent variables’ in other branches of psychology. Psychologists make
extensive use of psychological tests when conducting experiments. A clinical psychologist
may suspect that feelings of hopelessness often lead to suicide attempts. In order to test this
hypothesis, it is obviously necessary to have some way of measuring hopelessness and by
far the simplest way of doing so is to look for an appropriate psychological test. Cognitive
psychologists studying the link between mood and memory (‘state dependent memory’)
must be able to assess both mood and memory in order to be able to test whether
a particular theory is valid and so they need sound mood questionnaires and tests or
experimental tasks measuring memory.

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 Introduction to individual differences

l Other branches of psychology can predict behaviour better when they consider individual
differences. Other branches of psychology rely on broad laws to predict behaviour, for
example ‘behaviour therapy’, in which the principles of conditioning are used to break
some undesirable habit. The therapist may know that a certain percentage of his or her
patients may be ‘cured’ by this technique, but is unlikely to be able to predict whether any
one individual is more or less likely than average to beneft from the therapy. However, it
might well be found that the effectiveness of a particular type of treatment is affected by
the individual’s personality and/or ability – a treatment that is successful in some individuals
may be much less successful in others. By taking such individual differences into account,
statistical tests become more sensitive. Instead of using analysis of variance to determine
whether patients who are given behaviour therapy for a particular problem tend to show
fewer symptoms than those who are assigned to a control condition, it is far better also to
measure relevant personality and ability traits. One can then perform what is known as an
‘analysis of covariance’ instead. This shows whether the personality and ability traits are
related to the number of symptoms shown and whether the two groups differ in the number
of symptoms shown. It can show whether individual differences and/or the experimental
condition infuence behaviour.

Main questions
Any attempt to understand the nature of individual differences must really address two quite
separate questions. The frst concerns the nature of individual differences – how individual
differences should be conceptualised. There is a wide range of answers to this question, as will
be seen in the following chapters. Indeed, it has been suggested that personality does not exist
and that how we behave may be determined entirely by the situations in which we fnd
ourselves rather than by anything ‘inside us’ and the evidence for such claims must be
scrutinised carefully.
The second important question concerns how and why individual differences in mood,
motivation, ability and personality arise. It should be clear that research into the ‘how’ of
individual differences can really only start once there is general agreement about their
structure. It would be a waste of time to perform experiments in order to try to understand
how ‘sociability’ (or ‘creativity’, ‘depression’, ‘the drive for achievement’, etc.) works if there
is no good evidence that sociability is an important dimension of personality in the frst place.
Thus studies of processes must logically follow on from studies of structure. Process models
of individual differences address questions such as the following. Why should some children
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perform much better than others at school? Why should some people be shy and others
outgoing? Why do some individuals’ moods swing wildly from depression to elation and back
again? Why are some individuals apparently motivated by money to the exclusion of all else?
We cannot hope to answer all of these questions in the following chapters, but we shall
certainly explore what is known about the biological (and to some extent the social) processes
that underlie personality, mood, ability and motivation.
There is, however, one problem. Unless it is possible to measure individual differences
accurately, it will be completely impossible either to determine the structure of personality,
intelligence, etc. or to investigate its underlying processes. The development of good, accurate
measures of individual differences (a branch of psychology known as psychometrics) is an
absolutely vital step in developing and testing theories about the nature of individual
differences and their underlying processes. For this reason, this book contains several chapters
(3, 5, 8, 19–21) that focus on measurement issues.

Cooper, Colin. Individual Differences and Personality, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csuau/detail.action?docID=6282242.
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 Introduction to individual differences

How can we discover individual differences?

What sort of data should we use to discover individual differences? This is not an easy
question to answer, for there are several possibilities.

Clinical theories
Several theories have grown out of the experiences of clinical psychologists, who realised that
the ways in which they conceptualised ‘abnormal behaviour’ (particularly conditions such as
anxiety, depression and perhaps
schizophrenia) might also
prove useful in understanding
individual differences in the
‘normal’ population. Some
have probably been rather
quick to do this. Freud, for
example, saw rather small
samples of upper-middle-class
Viennese women (many of
whom showed symptoms that
are so unusual that they do not
appear in modern diagnostic
manuals), refused to believe
some of what they told him
(such as memories of sexual abuse) and built up an enormous and complex theory about the
personality structure and functions of humankind in general. Some clinically based theories
are discussed in Chapter 2, and Freud’s contribution is covered in Chapter 4.

Studying individuals in detail

Many people claim to have a rather good understanding of ‘what makes others tick’ – for
members of their families and close friends, at any rate. For example, we may believe that we
know through experience how to calm down (or annoy) others to whom we are close and
may feel that we have a good, intuitive understanding of the types of issue that are important
to them, thereby allowing us to
‘see the world from their point
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of view’ and predict their

behaviour. For example, we all
have some intuitive feeling
about when to mention diffcult
issues to those close to us.
Perhaps getting to understand
individuals in this way should
be the mainstay of individual
difference research?
There are several diffculties
with this approach, even if it
can be proved that it leads
to accurate prediction of

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 Introduction to individual differences

behaviour. First, it will (presumably) take a long period of time to know anyone well enough
to be able to make good predictions about their behaviour. Second, it is not particularly
scientifc, as it will be diffcult to quantify anything, or say precisely how one intuits that the
other person will behave. Third, the vagaries of language will make it very diffcult to
determine whether different people operate in different ways. Two people could describe the
same characteristic in an individual in two quite different ways and it would be impossible to
be sure that they were referring to precisely the same characteristic. However, the greatest
problem of all is self-deception. It is very easy to overestimate how well one can predict
someone else’s behaviour and there is good evidence that most observers will see and remember
the 1% of behaviours that were correctly predicted and ignore or explain away the 99% of
predictions that were incorrect – a phenomenon called ‘confrmatory bias’. Davies (2003)
discusses this in the context of personality assessment.

Armchair speculation
If one has made good, unbiased observations of how individuals behave in many situations,
it might be reasonable to generate and test some hypotheses about behaviour. For example,
you may notice that some individuals tend to be anxious and jumpy, worry, lose their temper
more easily than most and so on. That is, the observer may notice that a whole bundle of
characteristics seem to vary together and suggest that ‘anxiety’ (or something similar) might
be an interesting aspect of personality. Of course, there are likely to be all sorts of problems
associated with such casual observations. The observations may simply be wrong, or they may
fail to take account of situations. For example, the people who were perceived as being
anxious might all have been in some stressful situation – it may be that the situation (rather
than the person) determines how they react. Moreover, the ideas may be expressed so vaguely
that they are impossible to test, as in Plato’s observation that the mind is like a chariot drawn
by four horses. Literature contains several testable hypotheses about personality, for example
when Shakespeare speaks through Julius Caesar:

Let me have men about me that are fat, Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights,
Yond’ Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
(Shakespeare: Julius Caesar I:ii)

This quotation suggests some rather interesting (and potentially empirically testable) process
models of ‘dangerousness’.
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Scientifc assessment of individuals using

mental tests
Because of the problems inherent in other approaches discussed already, many psychologists
opt for a more scientifc approach to the study of personality and other forms of individual
difference. One popular approach involves the use of statistical techniques to discover
consistencies in behaviours across situations and to determine which behaviours tend to occur
together in individuals. The raw data of such methods are either behaviours (such as
performance on test items that require certain skills or knowledge), ratings of behaviour
(obtained by trained raters who note well-defned behaviours and so very different from the
clinical approach just mentioned) or self-ratings on questionnaires that are constructed using
sound statistical techniques. Much care is taken to ensure that the measurements are both
accurate and replicable.

Cooper, Colin. Individual Differences and Personality, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csuau/detail.action?docID=6282242.
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 Introduction to individual differences

A major problem with this

approach was fagged by Michell
(1997). The problem is that most
research in individual differences
uses questionnaires or tests, as is
discussed in Chapter 3 – and Michell
argues that the numbers which these
tests produce do not constitute
proper scientific measurement.
A typical questionnaire item might
be ‘do you suffer from “nerves”?’
and respondents are asked whether
they strongly agree, agree, are
neutral, disagree or strongly disagree
with the statement. This item might
be scored by awarding fve points
for ‘strongly agree’, down to one
point for ‘strongly disagree’; the
higher the score on this item, the
more neurotic the individual is
thought to be. The problem is that
these numbers do not behave the
same way as measurements of
length, weight, etc. For example,
you should be concerned about
whether someone who agrees with
the item (scoring 4) is twice as
neurotic as someone who disagrees
(scoring 2). If you think that they
are, remember that using numbers between 1 and 5 to represent the various responses was
arbitrary; I could have chosen the numbers 0 to 4, in which case someone who agreed with
the item (scoring 3) would have a score which is three times as large as someone who disagreed
with it (scoring 1) . . . It is good to worry about such issues, because most psychologists – even
professionals and learned researchers – do not, and tend to ignore Michell’s work in the hope
that it will somehow go away. We return to these issues in Chapter 3.
Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Summary
This brief chapter has introduced the general area of individual differences and has suggested
that the topic is worth studying because of its inherent interest, the many practical applications
of tests designed to measure individual differences, the need to measure individual differences
in order to test theories in other branches of psychology and the ability to make more accurate
predictions from theories that consider both individual differences and the impact of
experimental interventions on behaviour. We have also considered some methods for studying
individual differences, each with its own advantages and drawbacks, and have introduced the
distinction between structural models (‘how do people differ?’) and process models which try
to explain how these individual differences arise and operate.

Cooper, Colin. Individual Differences and Personality, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csuau/detail.action?docID=6282242.
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 Introduction to individual differences

References
Davies, M. F. (2003). Confrmatory Bias in the Evaluation of Personality Descriptions: Positive
Test Strategies and Output Interference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
85(4), 736–744.
Michell, J. (1997). Quantitative Science and the Defnition of Measurement in Psychology.
British Journal of Psychology, 88, 355–383.
Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Cooper, Colin. Individual Differences and Personality, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csuau/detail.action?docID=6282242.
Created from csuau on 2023-11-06 10:23:44.
Copyright © 2020. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.

Cooper, Colin. Individual Differences and Personality, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csuau/detail.action?docID=6282242.
Created from csuau on 2023-11-06 10:23:44.