Differential Psychology

Differential psychology studies the ways in which individuals differ in their behavior and the processes that underlie it. This is distinguished from other aspects of psychology in that although psychology is ostensibly a study of individuals, modern psychologists often study groups or biological underpinnings of cognition.

What most groups of people have in common.

The area of psychology concerned with measuring and comparing differences in individual and group behavior.

Branch of psychology that deals with individual and group differences in behaviour.

No one today can ignore the genetic approach to cognition and behavior, given the huge achievements of the Human Genome Project.

One of the hardest things to do when writing fiction is to get your head into the space of someone who thinks completely differently to you. It is all too easy to characterise another person's way of thinking with splashes of parody, misunderstanding or cartoonish mockery.

When we talk about individual differences in psychology here at GNXP, they are almost always differences in some form of intelligence - the real-world consequences of these differences, what inter-group variation there is in the trait, the lower-level biological correlates of such differences, and so on. This is all well and good, but we shouldn't forget the other half of differential psychology: personality.

This is a website full of stuff that should be useful and enjoyable if you are studying OCR psychology. Psychology often makes generalisations about people. Depending upon your point of view this can be seen as a great strength of psychology or a weakness or probably both.

A great deal of psychological research takes what is called a nomothetic approach; it tries to find things that are similar for all people so that we can find laws of behaviour that can be generalised to everyone. But isn't it a little boring treating everyone as being the same when there is so much variety in the world? The individual differences approach takes an ideographic view of people, looking to investigate the things that make people different, or even unique.

Evolutionary psychology has seen the majority of its success exploring adaptive features of the mind believed to be ubiquitous across our species. This has given rise to the belief that the adaptationist approach has little to offer the field of differential psychology, which concerns itself exclusively with the ways in which individuals systematically differ.

Differential Psychology on slideshare.

Information about the field of differential psychology.