Personality and experimental psychology: The unification of psychology and the possibility of a paradigm.

Abstract

It is suggested that the scientific status of psychology is put in danger by the lack of paradigms in many of its fields, and by the failure to achieve unification, psychology is breaking up into many different disciplines. One important cause was suggested by Lee Cronbach in his 1957 presidential address to the American Psychological Association: the continuing failure of the two scientific disciplines of psychology-the experimental and the correlational-to come together and mutually support each other. Personality study in particular has suffered from this disunity, and the debates about the number of major dimensions of personality illustrate the absurdity of the situation. Examples are given to show that by combining methods and theories typical of these two disciplines, one can put forward paradigms that would be impossible without such unification. Such a paradigm is suggested for personality and intelligence.