People differ from one another in important and interesting ways. Every action, thought, and feeling an individual exhibits is the result of who they are and what environment they’re in. Patterns of actions, thoughts, and feelings across situations communicate information about who the individual is, which also conveys information about their past and their future. Differences in these patterns between people help us to understand what makes them unique and predict their future behaviors, desires, and outcomes. Intelligence and personality are two of the most important categories of psychological differences between people. As much as some people try to simplify the world into types (e.g., “genius”, “psychopath”, “INTJ”), people differ from each other by degrees on sliding scales. Even gender isn’t as clearly dichotomous as many tend to believe.
Intelligence (also known as cognitive ability) is how capable people are of processing, understanding, reasoning with, remembering, and generally dealing with information/complexity.
Personality is people’s tendencies to think, feel, and act in particular ways.
This website endeavors to:
- Provide taxonomies: consistent and defined nomenclature to enable people to talk widely and deeply about personality and cognitive ability traits.
- Map what scales measure each trait: a measure’s name isn’t always a good indicator of what it actually measures.
- Share how personality and cognitive ability are related: we provide results of the largest meta-analyses of personality-cognitive ability relations, and in the process, suggest improved methods for meta-analysis.
Know thyself: take a science-based personality and cognitive ability assessment and get a free report about your traits.
How to cite this webpage:
Stanek, K. C. & Ones, D. S. (2018, January 29). Understanding Psychological Differences Between People. Retrieved from http://stanek.workpsy.ch/