Eysenck's Model of Individual Differences

Introduction

Hans Eysenck made many pioneering contributions to clinical, experimental, social, political, criminal, developmental, genetic, health and aesthetic psychology, although his best-known work was in personality psychology. These rich diverse contributions are clearly testament to his extensive intellect and enquiring mind, but a closer look at his writings reveals a consistent and systematic approach to unravelling behaviour in all these domains and which I shall term the individual difference paradigm (IDP). There are three pillars to this paradigm. First, adoption of a dimensional approach to quantifying individual characteristics; second, that a sufficient understanding requires a matching of correlational and experimental methods to be complete; and third, that accounting for person-situation variation is the key to building causal ...