Beyond the illusion of personality: Part IV: A comment on ‘personality’ functioning

An enormous amount of papers in the field of personality disorder tend to fall prey to a cognitive bias that I have termed ''the illusion of personality (pathology)'': that is, the tendency to view all individual differences as personality differences (and their deviations from the norm as personality problems). In this brief paper, I illustrate this bias using a recent example: namely, a study that found evidence for ''relational functioning'' being implicated in interpersonal processes, yet erroneously concluded that this is evidence for ''personality functioning'' being ''a maintaining transdiagnostic factor for psychopathology''. It is important to emphasise that my critique here does not aim to be a judgemental nit-picking of this particular study. Instead, my critique aims to highlight how widespread this bias is in the hopes of making research on personality more scientifically accurate and humane.