Bringing Back the Person into Behavioural Personality Science Using Big Data

Abstract

Behaviour and the individual person are important but widely neglected topics of personality psychology. We argue that new technologies to collect and new methods to analyse Big (Behavioural) Data have the potential to bring back both more behaviour and the individual person into personality science. The call for studying the individual person in the history of personality science, the related idiographic/nomothetic divide, as well as attempts to reconcile these two approaches are briefly reviewed. Furthermore, different meanings of the term idiographic and some unique selling points that emphasize the importance of idiographic research are highlighted. A nonexhaustive literature review shows that a wealth of behaviours are considered in extant personality studies using such Big Data but only in a nomothetic way. Against this background, we demonstrate the potential of Big Data collection and analysis with regard to four idiographic research topics: (i) unique manifestations of common traits and the resurgence of personal dispositions, (ii) idiographic prediction, (iii) intraindividual consistency versus variability of behaviour and (iv) intraindividual personality trait change through intervention. Methodological, ethical and legal pitfalls of doing Big Data research with individual persons as well as potential countermeasures are considered.

Averting the next credibility crisis in Psychological Science: Within-person methods for personalized diagnostic and intervention

“…(see also Barbot et al, 2020, Renner et al, 2020. With these developments converging, this may finally be the moment for a proactive revision of psychological theories with the goal of reaching truly personalized descriptions, and in the long run, personalized treatments.…”

“…It may surprise how many established, much-cited psychological theories still predominantly use between-person methods to study within-person patterns, considering the many years of debates about the limitations of between-person methods (e.g., Asendorpf, 2000) and the number of available within-person approaches (e.g., Barbot et al, 2020;Fleeson, 2004;Molenaar, 2004;Renner et al, 2020;Reitzle & Dietrich, 2019;Beck & Jackson, 2021). Some research areas have widely adopted some (but not all) within-person methods described above.…”

“…The lack of ergodicity / Simpson's paradox is currently the most frequently mentioned argument for within-person methods and a leading argument in the various manifestos calling for within-person methods (e.g., Barbot et al, 2020;Molenaar, 2004;Renner et al, 2020).…”

“…"manifestos" in which eminent experts demanded "bringing the person back into psychological science" by using within-person methods (Molenaar, 2004, p. 201;Barbot et al, 2020;Renner et al, 2020). Various within-person methods have been proposed as solutions for better descriptions of individuals (e.g., Beltz et al, 2004;Völkle et al, 2014;von Eye, 2003), but neither do they solve all the known methodological problems of describing RUNNING HEAD: Averting the next credibility crisis in Psychological Science 4 individuals, nor have they been sufficiently applied in studies on psychological theories, in personalized learning, or other disciplines aiming for personalization, such as personalized medicine.…”

Personalized Behavior Prediction: An Idiographic Person-Situation Test

“…We argue that by adopting an idiographic, machine learning-based prediction approach that incorporates information about persons, situations, and time relative only to a single person's experience will allow us to accurately predict future behavior and experiences (Renner, Klee, & von Oertzen, 2020). In the clinical psychology domain, previous research has indicated that future behaviors, like smoking (Fisher & Soyster, 2019) and food craving (Butter et al, 2020) (1) can be predicted with high levels of accuracy using these methods and (2) that the degree of predictability and the important features across people vary considerably.…”