Why the One and the Many Will Not Go Away

Some Reasons for Allport’s Distinction

The Contrast Between the nomothetic versus the idiographic was popularized in psychology by Gordon Allport (1937). In the early 1930s, Allport made his name by advocating for a quantitative, trait-based approach to the study of personality in contrast with the prevailing case study approach. In doing so, he was following the trend toward greater reliance on measurement in psychology as a whole. Allport, however, had grave doubts about the sufficiency of quantitative measurement for developing an understanding of individual psychological functioning. The nomothetic versus the idiographic was meant to give voice to these doubts.¹

For Allport, the nomothetic referred to the study of populations with the aim of discovering the laws of the human mind in general—or The One. The general mind, said Allport, is an abstraction referring to what individuals have in common. As an abstraction, it excludes individual particularities. Allport felt that this exclusion was continually returning to haunt scientific psychology. The idiographic referred to the conceptualization of individual persons as more than instances of general principles. It was a strategy of particularizing—of recognizing The Many.

Case studies and individual histories were not Allport’s primary approach to particularizing. As a group, American psychologists emphasized the study of individual differences rather the discovery of universal laws of mind. Allport’s own work in psychological measurement resided in the former tradition. Personality traits are quantifiable, population-based concepts for understanding variation from group averages, but each individual can also be uniquely described by a profile of her or his positions on each trait.

In many ways, the proposal of Panagoitus Oulis (2013) is in sympathy with Allport’s views. Like Allport, Oulis seeks generalizations that also represent individual variation. Allport, it must be said, never succeeded in closing the gap between the nomothetic and the idiographic. Either by inclination or disciplinary convention, he remained more scientifically inclined in his work than not (Nicholson 2003). It was not even a gap that he thought should be closed. Allport did not believe that empirically based scientific generalizations were sufficient for understanding a whole person, but he contended that they were necessary. In this article, I suggest that Oulis’s perspective is close to that of Allport, but could be improved on by becoming even closer, philosophically. Oulis is correct about the importance of being able to make scientifically valid generalizations based on group membership, but the problem of particularity that he is a attempting to resolve is not eliminated, nor can it be.

Particularizing

A primary inspiration for Oulis’s proposal is the call by the International Guidelines for Diagnostic Assessment (IGDA) Workgroup to add an idiographic (personalized) formulation to the conventional manualized diagnosis (WPA 2003). In addition to contextualizing the clinical problem, an idiographic formulation is supposed to identify a patient’s strengths and expectations for recovery. Consistent with Allport’s view about what concepts exclude, the concern is that labeling a person with a general category name tends to conceal as much (or even more) about a case as it reveals.

Oulis suggests that generalizations should be made about groups that have been particularized. For example, take a group that includes only women with a first episode major depression (Axis I) who are avoidant (Axis II), recently menopausal (Axis III), alienated from their spouses (Axis IV), and not coping well (Axis V).² Once this group is defined as a ‘population,’ its members can be randomly sampled and what is learned about the sample can be inferred to hold for the whole group. This is one way of addressing the IGDA’s call for contextualizing the clinical problem.

As Oulis acknowledges, an important practical complication is that few (or no) researchers will be able to find enough participants to run a study using this grouping let alone to find enough studies to support a meta-analysis. As what Oulis calls “all the major particularities” (Oulis 2013, 120) are added, the number of people who could potentially be selected to participate in the study would be increasingly...