Neglect of the individual as a neglected problem: the relevance of combined idiographic-nomothetic approaches for social psychology today

Abstract

The present paper examines the bias in social psychology toward aggregate-level research and the resulting neglect of the individual. We first revisit Susan Andersen’s work on transference as an example of how idiographic features can be successfully integrated into research designs with broader nomothetic goals. We argue that the field’s historical overemphasis on summarizing across individuals frequently obscures the qualitatively distinct psychological structures and processes operating within them. This creates a significant theory – method gap: while psychological theories acknowledge individual heterogeneity, research practices remain tethered to a top-down, group-to-individual generalization framework. Following a review of the logical and mathematical requirements necessary for valid group-to-individual inference, we demonstrate how relying on between-person aggregates as a proxy for universal lawfulness leads to a structural neglect of the individual. We provide a brief overview of modern idiographic quantitative methods that allow for a bottom-up discovery of shared lawfulness. We conclude by advocating for a flexible research strategy that calibrates the level of personalization to achieve desired inferential goals, thereby resolving the historical tension between idiographic and nomothetic aims.