Network Approaches to Representing and Understanding Personality Dynamics
From its emergence at the beginning of the 20th century, personality scientists pursued two goals – a nomothetic approach that investigated the structure of individual differences between people in a population and an idiographic approach that explored variation within a person relative to him or herself. Implicit in both was an assumption that dynamic processes underlay the emergence of personality within and across people, but available methods at the time precluded testing dynamic questions. In this chapter, we first track the how the history of both nomothetic idiographic perspectives impacted the study of personality structure and dynamics. Next, we review findings and unanswered contemporary questions regarding nomothetic and idiographic structure, processes, and dynamics. Finally, we conclude by arguing for an idiographic network approach to understanding personality based in dynamic systems theory. We provide both theoretical questions for future research, some of which were proposed by early personality theorists but progressed slowly due to a lack of adequate methods, as well as cutting-edge techniques for actually testing them. We believe these methods capable of moving the study of personality dynamics – and personality more broadly -- forward.