Understanding patients: Implicit personality theory and the general practitioner

The patient-centred general practitioner (GP) is expected to advance beyond biomedical illness categorization (the disease-centred method) and develop an understanding of the 'whole person' in order to inform clinical decision making. This paper argues that researchers cannot yet provide GPs with a relevant, reliable and predictive model of individual behaviour that would apply unproblematically to their everyday clinical work. Without such a system, it is hypothesized that GPs will continue to use their own implicit personality theories and models of human behaviour in their attempts to understand and predict patient behaviour. Research into such theories from a variety of perspectives could illuminate their content, structure, validity and function in general practice.