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.