Gordon Willard Allport (November 11, 1897 - October 9, 1967) was an American Psychologist born in Montezuma, Indiana, who played a major role in shaping the fields of Personality psychology and Social psychology.
He had wide-ranging interests in eidetic imagery, religion, social attitudes, rumor, and radio.
Gordon Allport's undergraduate and doctoral degrees were both from Harvard University, where he studied with Hugo Münsterberg, Herbert Langfeld, and William McDougall. His entire academic career was spent at Harvard. During that period, he received numerous honorary doctorates.
In1919, Allport earned his A.B. degree in Philosophy and Economics (not psychology).
Allport told the story in his autobiographical essay in Pattern and Growth in Personality of his visit as a young, recent college graduate to the already famous Sigmund Freud in Vienna. He rejected the Freudian psychoanalytic approach as relying too much on the effects of the past without giving sufficient attention to issues of the current context.
Allport traveled and studied in Turkey, Germany, and England for 2 years. Through college, teaching in Turkey, and postgraduate study at the University of Berlin, University of Hamburg, and University of Cambridge during the years immediately after World War I, he became familiar with Gestalt Psychology and other important developments in German psychology.
In 1921 through 1937, Allport helped establish personality as a psychological research type within American psychology. He returned to Harvard as an instructor in psychology from 1924 to 1926 where he began teaching his course "Personality: Its Psychological and Social Aspects" in 1924.
Allport married to Ada Lufkin Gould, who was a clinical psychologist. Together they had one child, a boy, who later became a pediatrician.
In 1931, Gordon served on the faculty committee that established Harvard's Sociology Department.
In 1933, He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
By 1937, Allport began to act as a spokesman for personality psychology. He appeared on radio talk shows, wrote literature reviews, articles, and a textbook.
In 1939, Allport was elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA).
In the late 1940s, he helped to develop an introductory course for the new Social Relations Department. At that time, he was also editor of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.
Allport was also a Director of the Commission for the United Nations Educational Scientific, and Cultural Organization.
In 1944, he served as President of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. In 1950, Allport published his third book titled The Individual and His Religion.
His fourth book, The Nature of Prejudice, was published in 1954, based on his work with refugees during World War II.
His fifth book, published in 1955, was titled Becoming: Basic Considerations for Psychology of Personality.
In 1963, he received the APA's (American Psychological Foundation) Gold Medal. It bore the inscription: "To Gordon Williard Allport, outstanding teacher and scholar, He has brought warmth, wit, humanistic knowledge, and rigorous enquiry to the study of human individuality and social process."
Throughout his career, Gordon Allport placed greater emphasis on the "idiographic" or "morphogenic" approach to personality research than on the "nomothetic" or "dimensional" study of personality. Morphogenic study stresses the perspective of how traits and other personality variables become integrated into the unique structures of individual persons whereas the dimensional approach stresses the study of one or more variables across a large sample of different persons.
Allport served a long term as editor to the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. He was a founder of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). In the years after World War I, he was a major channel for the spread of European concepts and approaches.
Personality-trait theory
According to Allport's Personality-trait Theory, the individual's personality traits are the key to the uniqueness and consistency of his or her behavior. One of Allport's early projects was to go through the dictionary and locate every term that he thought could describe a person. From this, he developed a list of 3000 trait like words. He organized these into three levels of traits.
- Cardinal trait—This is the trait that dominates and shapes a person's behavior. These are rare as most people lack a single theme that shapes their lives.
- Central trait—This is a general characteristic found in some degree in every person. These are the basic building blocks that shape most of our behavior although they are not as overwhelming as cardinal traits. An example of a central trait would be honesty.
- Secondary trait—These are characteristics seen only in certain circumstances. They must be included to provide a complete picture of human complexity.
Allport was one of the first researchers to draw a distinction between "motive" and "drive." He suggested that a drive formed as a reaction to a motive may out-grow the motive as a reason. The drive then is autonomous and distinct from the motive, whether it is instinct or any other.
In his book, The Individual and His Religion (1950), Gordon Allport illustrated how people may use religion in different ways. He makes a distinction between a "mature" religious orientation and an "immature" religious orientation. A person with a mature religious orientation would have an approach to religion that is dynamic, open-minded, and able to maintain links between inconsistencies. In contrast, a person with an immature religious orientation would be self-serving and generally would embody the negative stereotypes that people have about religion.
Allport devised a scale—referred to as Allport's Scale of Prejudice and Discrimination, Allport's Scale of Prejudice, or simply Allport’s Scale—as a measure of prejudice in a society. He first published the scale in The Nature of Prejudice (1954).
Allport’s Scale of Prejudice is measured from 1 – 5.
Scale 1, Antilocution Antilocution means a majority group freely make jokes about a minority group. Speech is in terms of negative stereotypes and negative images. This is also called hate speech. It is commonly seen as harmless by the majority. Antilocution itself may not be harmful, but it sets the stage for more severe outlets for prejudice. Examples are jokes about various ethnic groups and so forth.
Scale 2, Avoidance People in a minority group are actively avoided by members of the majority group. No direct harm may be intended, but harm is done through isolation.
Scale 3, Discrimination Minority group is discriminated against by the denying of opportunities and services and thus, putting prejudice into action. Behaviors have the specific goal of harming the minority group by preventing them from achieving goals, achieving education, or jobs. The majority group is actively trying to harm the minority.
Scale 4 Physical Attack The majority group vandalize minority group materially; they burn property and carry out violent attacks on individuals or groups. Physical harm is done to members of the minority group. Examples include lynchings of blacks, pogroms against Jews in Europe, tarring and feathering of Mormons in the 1800s.
Scale 5 Extermination The majority group seeks extermination of the minority group through genocide. They attempt to liquidate the entire group of people (Native American populations, "Final Solution of Jewish Problem," "Ethnic Cleansing" in Bosnia, and so forth).
Gordon Allport died on October 9, 1967, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of lung cancer, just one month shy of his 70th birthday.
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