Individual Differences Inadequate recognition of individual differences is a methodological deficiency that has seriously slowed psychological research.
Lip service is paid to individual differences, but in reality they are largely ignored.
I believe this failure to recognize individual differences is the rock on which psychology's early attempts to establish itself as an introspective discipline foundered. Following the lead of the tremendously successful physical scientists, the early psychologists searched for general laws of the mind, and when their data turned out to be contradictory, they quarreled with each other over who was right, not realizing they were all right, and so wasted their energies. They tried to abstract too much too soon before coming to terms with the experiential subject matter. Problems arising when individual differences are ignored. Charts A, B, and C are experiential mappings of the sort done in Figure 5-1.