Individual Differences and Personality

Where most of psychology hunts for what makes us alike, this course flips the question and asks why no two people end up the same — tracing personality, intelligence, and self-concept through psychoanalytic, biological, behaviorist, cognitive, trait, and humanistic lenses, with the nature-nurture debate running underneath all of it. You'll work through a midterm and final essay, build a learning portfolio, and run a group project that you present in class, alongside readings from Friedman's textbook. It pairs naturally with social and developmental psychology, and gives you the measurement vocabulary — construct validity, convergent and discriminant validity, trait stability — that you'll need before touching clinical, organizational, or assessment-heavy courses later on.