LAUSR

The neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband coined the terms nomothetic and idiographic to describe different disciplines of gaining knowledge. Whilst the idiographic approach, situated within the field of the humanities, seeks to understand the unique, private and subjective phenomena, the nomothetic approach, situated within the natural sciences, deals with the discovery of general laws and objective phenomena. Greatly influenced by Hugo Münsterberg and William Stern (both of whom wrote extensively on the subject of Windelband's distinction), the psychologist Gordon Allport (1937) introduced the distinction into personality trait theory. Allport's publication of Personality: A Psychological Interpretation did not only initiate an important discourse and debate on the nomothetic versus idiographic issue in psychology, but unfortunately led to the still widely held belief that both are distinctly opposed to each other (Hurlburt & Knapp, 2006). Moreover, the question that has for centuries concerned philosophers and psychologists alike, namely how and why people differed, was now believed to be only truly answered by following the nomothetic approach. From the 1930s, the study of personality and individual differences was informed and shaped primarily by empirical personality research employing Received: 1 September 2020 | Revised: 25 October 2020 | Accepted: 28 October 2020 DOI: 10.1002/capr.12367