Understanding personality as a system helps people to understand themselves and others.  Understanding the self and knowing how to discover new information about the self helps people to grow, adapt and make decisions.  Understanding other people’s personalities helps people to work with others and provides a foundation for courses on abnormal behavior and counseling.  Being able to recognize clues to behaviors such as those in the person’s environment or a person’s possessions aids in the awareness of how the residues of personality can provide clues about personality.  These clues can then be used to form accurate models of the personality system, which can be used to make predictions about the self and others.  This understanding is helpful when trying to make decisions about others and ourselves, such as which career would be most appropriate for myself or another person.

Science has developed theories to help us understand the way that the personality system works. Knowing and applying these models to others and ourselves aids in the understanding of these personalities.  It is important for students to understand the research methods by which these theories have been developed and the assessment methods that researchers use to measure personality attributes