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.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.
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