Gordon Allport

Gordon Allport was an American psychologist who is known for the study of the personality and the prejudice. He was one of the founders of the personality psychology and the social psychology.

Early Life and Education

Allport was born in 1897 in Montezuma, Indiana. His father was a physician and the family lived in the household that included the patients.

He studied at Harvard University and graduated in 1919. He taught in Turkey and studied at the University of Berlin and the University of Cambridge.

He took his doctorate at Harvard University in 1922. He taught at Dartmouth College and then at Harvard for most of his career.

The Study of the Personality

Allport published the book Personality: A Psychological Interpretation in 1937. The book established the personality psychology as a field.

He argued for the importance of the individual case and the uniqueness of the person. The approach was opposed to the general laws of the behaviourism.

He developed the concept of the trait. The traits are the stable dispositions that guide the behaviour.

He distinguished the cardinal and the central and the secondary traits. The theory organised the study of the personality.

The Prejudice and the Social Psychology

Allport published the book The Nature of Prejudice in 1954. The book is regarded as one of the most influential of the works of the social psychology.

He studied the causes and the effects of the prejudice. He argued that the prejudice is the result of the normal cognitive processes and the social conditions.

He developed the contact hypothesis. The hypothesis holds that the contact between the groups can reduce the prejudice under the certain conditions.

He argued for the importance of the study of the values and the religion. The work influenced the later research on the intergroup relations.

The Legacy

Allport served as the president of the American Psychological Association in 1939. He was the editor of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.

He died in 1967 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was one of the most influential of the psychologists of the twentieth century.

His work founded the personality psychology and the study of the prejudice. The concepts of the trait and the contact hypothesis remain central.

He is regarded as one of the founders of the modern personality psychology. His work continues to be studied and applied.

Trait Theory and the Structure of Personality

Allport is often credited with introducing the trait approach to personality into the English-language literature. In Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (1937) he argued that personality is a dynamic organisation within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine characteristic behaviour and thought. Traits, in his system, are real neuropsychic structures rather than convenient statistical summaries; they dispose a person to perceive and act in consistent ways across many situations.

He distinguished three levels of traits. Cardinal dispositions dominate a person's life so thoroughly that they almost define the individual, as with the historical figure whose name becomes a byword. Central dispositions are the handful of traits, perhaps five to ten, that a person would use to describe himself or herself. Secondary dispositions are the numerous narrow tendencies that appear only in particular settings. Allport believed that central dispositions are the proper subject of personality study.

Allport also emphasised idiographic research, the intensive study of the single individual, alongside the nomothetic search for laws that hold across people. He maintained that no two individuals can be compared on identical traits because each person's traits are organised uniquely, a position that put him at odds with the later statistical factor-analytic approach of Raymond Cattell and Hans Eysenck. This tension between the study of uniqueness and the search for general laws remains a central debate in personality psychology.

The Nature of Prejudice

The Nature of Prejudice (1954) is Allport's most widely read book and remains the standard work on the subject. He defined prejudice as an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalisation, felt or expressed toward a group or an individual who belongs to that group. He showed that prejudice is ordinary rather than exceptional, arising from normal cognitive processes of categorisation, from group norms, and from the need to defend status, and that it can be reduced by conditions he specified with care.

The book introduced the contact hypothesis, the idea that intergroup hostility diminishes when members of different groups meet under four conditions: equal status within the situation, common goals, intergroup cooperation, and the support of legitimate authority. Thousands of later studies have tested and refined this hypothesis, confirming that structured contact reliably reduces prejudice and identifying the conditions under which it fails. The contact hypothesis underlies school desegregation policy, peace-building programmes and diversity training to this day.

Allport also developed the scale of prejudice, describing how hostile talk escalates through antilocution, avoidance, discrimination, physical attack and finally extermination, and he analysed the psychological functions that prejudice serves for the prejudiced person. His functional analysis distinguished the adjustive, ego-defensive, value-expressive and knowledge functions of attitudes, a scheme that later informed the theory of functional attitudes and persuasive communication.

Functional Autonomy and Later Work

Allport's theory of functional autonomy holds that motives may become independent of the childhood circumstances that originally produced them. A person may take up a trade for money and later work at it for its own sake; an adult may pursue interests that were once merely instrumental. This principle allowed Allport to argue that adult motivation is not simply a disguised version of infantile drives, and it separated his system sharply from psychoanalysis, which traces present motives back to their origins.

He distinguished propriate functions, those aspects of experience that are central to the self, from peripheral habits, and he described the development of the proprium from bodily self through self-identity, self-esteem, self-extension, self-image, rational coping and finally the propriate striving of the mature person. The mature personality, in his account, is characterised by self-extension, warm relating to others, emotional security, realistic perception, self-objectification and a unifying philosophy of life.

Allport also made lasting contributions to the study of attitudes, rumours, values and religion. His and Leo Postman's work on the psychology of rumour showed how reports are sharpened, levelled and assimilated to existing beliefs as they spread. His study of personal documents and letters advanced the idiographic method. He served as president of the American Psychological Association, taught at Harvard for most of his career, and trained a generation of social and personality psychologists. His combination of humanistic concern and empirical rigour keeps his work central to both fields.

See also

• Personality psychology
• Trait theory
• Prejudice
• Contact hypothesis