Background

Allport was born in Montezuma, Indiana, the youngest of four sons of John Edwards and Nellie Edith (Wise) Allport. When Gordon was 6 years old, the family had moved many times and finally settling in Ohio.

Education

He was educated at Harvard University and at the universities of Berlin, Hamburg, and Cambridge.

After teaching at Robert College in Constantinople and at Harvard and Dartmouth, he returned to Harvard as assistant professor, and in 1942 was made professor of psychology.

Career

Allport had a profound and lasting influence on the field of psychology, even though his work is cited much less often than that of other well-known figures. Part of his influence stemmed from his knack for attacking and broadly conceptualizing important and interesting topics (e. g. rumor, prejudice, religion, traits). Another part of his influence resulted from the deep and lasting impression he made on his students during his long teaching career, many of whom went on to have important careers in psychology. Among his many students were Jerome S. Bruner, Anthony Greenwald, Stanley Milgram, Leo Postman (fr), Thomas Pettigrew, and M. Brewster Smith. His brother Floyd Henry Allport, was professor of social psychology and political psychology at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs (in Syracuse, New York) from 1924 until 1956, and visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Allport as the 11th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Allport was elected President of the American Psychological Association in 1939. In 1943, he was elected President of the Eastern Psychological Association. 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, and benefited from his insights from working with refugees during World War II. His fifth book, published in 1955, was titled Becoming: Basic Considerations for Psychology of Personality. This book became one of his most widely known publications. Gordon Allport died on October 9, 1967, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of lung cancer. He was one month shy of being seventy years old.

Achievements

• Allport was one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personality psychology. He contributed to the formation of values scales and 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.
  
  In 1963, Allport was awarded the Gold Medal Award from the American Psychological Foundation. In the following year, he received the APA's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award.
  
  His most significant contributions include a theory of personality, which highlighted the self and the proprium, the latter defined as ‘all the regions of our life that we regard as peculiarly ours’; studies of the importance of prejudice as a historical and cultural, as well as a psychological, phenomenon; an emphasis on the importance of personal documents in social science (such as his collection of Letters from Jenny, 1965); and his championing of the ideographic method.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality (The Terry Lectures Series)

    ( A distinguished psychologist outlines here the need for...)

  • Concepts of Trait and Personality

    (Originally published in 1927 this classic article by Gord...)

  • Existential Psychology

    (Will be shipped from US. Used books may not include compa...)

  • Personality and Social Encounter

Views

Quotations: Allport says that the theory:

". .. 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. "

Membership

Gordon W. Allport was a longtime and influential member of the faculty at Harvard University from 1930 to 1967.

Connections

Allport married Ada Lufkin Gould, who was a clinical psychologist, and they had one child, a boy, who later became a pediatrician.

Father:

John Edwards Allport

Mother:

Nellie Edith (Wise) Allport

Brother:

Floyd Henry Allport

Wife:

Ada Lufkin Gould

References

• Humanism in Personology: Allport, Maslow, and Murray