Abstract:
The concept of the individual differences appeared together with the idea of personality traits as
common dimensions, on which individuals can be compared. However, the person exists and reacts
as a whole and no dimensions function in isolation. This requires studying within-the-individual
interactions and the new qualities created in the process of these interactions. Treating the person as a
list of characteristics falls into contradiction of the real life behaviour of human beings. To produce an
adequate picture, the scientific study of the person could follow the way real people do when studying
the individuality of other people. One does not evaluate the other person on a list of predetermined
dimensions, the real people observe other person’s behaviour, look for meaningful patterns and give
labels to the pattern, using natural language. In essence, the same path should be followed by an
ecological approach to studying real persons.
The present work presents first steps into conceptualization of uniqueness of the individual – the
human individuality – in a holistic picture embracing different levels of organization, leaving room for
dynamic fluctuations in both the content and the behaviour for its realization. Introduced also are ideas
on new ways of measuring individuality including new type of data gathering and scaling; study design
including time as an integral part, aggregation of unique personal meanings by conceptual cluster
analysis, data analysis done not on dimension-by-dimension but on person-by-person approach; and
data processing based on differential equations.
