DAVRANIŞ MEKANİZMASI VE ŞAHSİYET PROBLEMİ

It is a curious historical fact that personality research as a whole developed into an isolated field of study cut off from the main body of experimental psychology. Behavioural «manifestations of personality*, if they are not fictions and if they mean something truly psychological, should necessarily be the products of a mechanism working according to determinate laws. Personality psychologists did not aim at discovering these laws but at grasping countless individual differences in their concrete appearances. Firstly, they classified the differences into «personality traits», secondly, they established «personality types» by grouping these traits in various patterns on the basis of correlations, thirdly, they attempted to «diagnose» the personality of a given individual according to the degree of similarity to one of these types.