Gordon Allport

From New World Encyclopedia

Gordon Willard Allport (November 11 1897 - October 9 1967) was an American psychologist, who played a major role in shaping the fields of Personality Psychology and Social Psychology. Gordon Allport was a long time and influential member of the faculty at Harvard University, from 1930 to 1967. He had wide-ranging interests in eidetic imagery, religion, social attitudes, rumor, and radio. His basic works include Pattern and Growth in Personality and his most influential book The Nature of Prejudice.

Life

Gordon Williard Allport, the youngest of four brothers, was born in Montezuma, Indiana, in 1907. One of his elder brothers, Floyd Henry Allport, who had a positive impact on Gordon's professional orientation, was an important and influential psychologist as well. Gordon Allport's undergraduate and doctoral degrees were both from Harvard University, where he studied with Hugo Münsterberg, Herbert Langfeld, and William McDougall.

For two years, Allport traveled and studied in Turkey, Germany, and England. 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.These intellectual experiences and personal contacts had an enduring impact on his own later work and his contributions to American Psychology. Apart from few years at Dartmouth, Gordon Allport's entire academic career was spent at Harvard.During that period, he received numerous honorary doctarates.

  • Allport told the story in his autobiographical essay in Pattern and Growth in Personality [1] of his visit as a young, recent college graduate to the already famous Dr. Sigmund Freud in Vienna. To break the ice upon meeting Freud, Allport recounted how he had met a boy on the train on the way to Vienna who was afraid of getting dirty. He refused to sit down near anyone dirty, despite his mother's reassurances. Allport suggested that perhaps the boy had learned this dirt phobia from his mother, a very neat and apparently rather domineering type. After studying Allport for a minute, Freud asked, "And was that little boy you?" Allport experienced Freud's attempt to reduce this small bit of observed interaction to some unconscious episode from his own remote childhood as dismissive of his current motivations, intentions, and experience. It served as a reminder that psychoanalysis tends to dig too deeply into both the past and the unconscious, overlooking in the process the often more important conscious and immediate aspects of experience. While Allport never denied that unconscious and historical variables might have a role to play in human psychology (particularly in the immature and disordered), his own work would always emphasize conscious motivations and current context.

In 1939, Gordon Allport was elected president of American Psychological Association (APA). In 1963, Allport received the American Psychological Foundation's Gold Medal, saying, "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."

At his death, in 1967, Gordon Allport was Harvard's first Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, which meant that he was doing his best to unite psychological knowledge and ethical concerns, the two basic concerns of today's world.

Work and Contributions

Gordon Allport was one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the fathers of personality psychology. Allport regarded personality as the natural subject matter of psychology and believed that other standard topics, such as human learning, could not be adequately studied without taking into account the self or the ego, who wanted to learn. He rejected both a psychoanalytic approach to personality, which he thought often went too deep, and a behavioral approach, which he thought often did not go deep enough. He emphasized the uniqueness of each individual, and the importance of the present context, as opposed to past history, for understanding the personality.

Throughout his career, Gordon Allport emphasized the idiographic or morphogenic approach to personality research as opposed to 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 nomothetic approach stresses the study of one or more variables across a large sample of different persons. The idiographic-nomothetic distinction was especially emphasized by the ninetenth-century German theorists Windelband and Diltey as well as the psychologist William Stern, with whom Allport studied in Germany. Allport's position was not exclusively idiographic, however, he argued that nomothetic research and idiographic methods were necessary complements (Allport, 1962). Consistent with this emphasis Allport argued for the importance of case studies in personality psychology. Allport was not given to extremes. He avoided writing dogmatically and provocatively and prefered courtesy to controversy. He could aptly be called one of the first humanists in psychology, but he did not allow humanitarian sentiments to interfere with scientific integrity and logical thinking.

Gordon Allport realized that there is a fundamental contradiction between the scientific and intuitive views of man. These he refered to as the nomothetic and idiographic stantpoints. The nomothetist tries to arrive at general laws which apply to all human kind, and his procedures are based on accurate measurements of behavior. Inevitably this involves fragmentation of the individual into measureable variables. And the idiographic view sees each particular individual as a inique whole and relies largely on intuitive understanding. Allport believed that the two should be combined.

Allport's Trait Theory

Allport is known as a "trait" psychologist. One of his 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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Secondary trait - These are characteristics seen only in certain circumstances. They must be included to provide a complete picture of human complexity.

Functional Autonomy

Gordon Allport was one of the first researchers to draw a distinction between Motive and Drive. He formulated 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. Allport gives the example of a man who seeks to perfect his task or craft. His reasons may be a sense of inferiority engrained in his childhood but his dilligence in his work and the motive it acquires later on is a need to excel in his chosen profession. In the words of Allport, the theory "It avoids the absurdity of regarding the energy of life now, in the present, as somehow consisting of early archaic forms (instincts, prepotent reflexes, or the never-changing Id). Learning brings new systems of interests into existence just as it does new abilities and skills. At each stage of development these interests are always contemporary; whatever drives, drives now."

Psychology of Religion

In his book The Individual and His Religion (1950), Gordon Allport illustrates how people may use religion in different ways. He makes a distinction between Mature religion and Immature religion. Mature religious sentiment is how Allport characterised the person whose approach to religion is dynamic, open-minded, and able to maintain links between inconsistencies. In contrast, immature religion is self-serving and generally represents the negative stereotypes that people have about religion. More recently, this distinction has been encapsulated in the terms "intrinsic religion", referring to a genuine, heartfelt devout faith, and "extrinsic religion", referring to a more utilitarian use of religion as a means to an end, such as church attendance to gain social status. These dimensions of religion were measured on the Religious Orientation Scale of Allport and Ross (1967).

Prejudice

Allport’s Scale is a measure of prejudice in a society. It is also referred to as Allports Scale of Prejudice and Discrimination or Allports Scale of Prejudice. It was devised by psychologist Gordon Allport in The Nature of Prejudice (1954).


Allport’s Scale of Prejudice goes 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 the Irish, French, blacks, gays etc.

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 denying them opportunities and services and so putting prejudice into action. Behaviours have the specific goal of harming the minority group by preventing them from achieving goals, getting education or jobs, etc. The majority group is actively trying to harm the minority.

Scale 4 Physical Attack The majority group, vandalise minority group things, they burn property and carry out violent attacks on individuals or groups. Physical harm is done to members of the minority group Examples are lynchings of blacks, pogroms against Jews in Europe, tarring and feathering Mormons in 1800s.

Scale 5 Extermination The majority group seeks extermination of the minority group. They attempt to liquidate the entire group of people (e.g., Native American population, Final Solution of Jewish Problem, Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia, etc.).

Critic

Gordon Allport's personality theory put him at odd with the vast majority of American psychologists, who had been indoctrinated by behaviorist empiricism. Nevertheless, they did respect his viewpoint. He dealt with the bewildering complexity of personality by positing personality traits as the basic units. A trait is a generalized type of behavior which characterizes individual and distinguishes that person from others. It is a real and causal neuropsychic structure, not merely "biological" — that is deriving from impressions of people who observe the individual. This concept has been attacked by later writers who pointed out the frequent inconsistency, rather than the generality, of people's behavior in different situations. Unfortunately, Gordon Allport did not live long enough to answer these questions.

Legacy

Gordon Allport's contribution reflected a broad-based style of doing Social Psychology. He proposed attitude as the central organizing concept of the field. He defined attitude as a "mental and neural state of readiness ... exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual's response to all objects and situationswith which it is related" (Allport, 1935, p.810).

Allport's most enduring contribution to personality study was his intellectual stance of eclectic humanism, maintained in polite but determined opposition to the more doctrinaire approach of both psychoanalysis and behaviorism.

Allport had a profound and lasting influence on the field of psychology, even though his work is cited much less often than other well known figures. [2] Part of his influence stemmed from his knack for attacking and broadly conceptualizing important and interesting topics (e.g. rumor, prejudice, religion, character traits). Part of his influence was a result of the deep and lasting impression he made on his students during his long teaching career, many of whom went on to have important psychological careers. Among his many students were: Anthony Greenwald, Stanley Milgram, Leo Postman, Thomas Pettigrew, and M. Brewster Smith.

Gordon Allport played an important administrative and editorial role in the twentieth-century American Psychology. He 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. At a distance as well as directly, Allport was a mentor to many twentieth-century psychologists. In the years before World War II, he helped establish refugee psychologists fleeing Nazi Germany.

Gordon Allport's Major Publications

Notes

  1. Allport, Gordon: Pattern and Growth in Personality; Harcourt College Pub., ISBN 0-03-010810-1
  2. http://www.stolaf.edu/people/huff/misc/Allporttalk.html

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Allport, G. 1935. Attitudes. In C. Murchison (Ed.), A handbook of social psychology (pp. 798-844). Worchester, MA: Clark University Press.
  • Allport, G. 1954. The Nature of Prejudice, Addison-Wesley.
  • Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne
  • Allport,G. 1960. Personality and social encounter: Selected essays. Boston: Beacon Prees.
  • Allport, G. 1962. The general and the unique in psychological science. Journal of Personality. 30, 405-422.
  • Allport, G. 1965. Letters from Jenny. New York: Harcourt Brace.
  • Ben-David, J. and R. Collins. 1966. "Social factors in the origin of a new science: The case of psychology" American Psychological Review. 31, 451-465.
  • Boring, E.G. 1950. A history of experimental psychology, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0133900398
  • Brennan, J.F. 1986. History and systems of psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. ISBN 0133922189
  • Leahey, Th. H. 1991. A History of Modern Psychology. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall. 3rd edition. 2000. ISBN 0130175730
  • Stevens S. S. 1935. "The operational definition of psychological concepts" in Psychological Review. 42, 517-527.
  • Matlin, MW., (1995) Psychology. Texas: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.
  • Milgram, Stanley. (1977) The individual in a social world : essays and experiments. ISBN 0201043823.
  • Winter, D.G. 1997. Allport life and Allport's psychology. Journal of Personality. 65, 723-731.

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