Background

Gordon Willard Allport was born on November 11, 1897 in Montezuma, Indiana, United States. He was the son of John Edward Allport, a businessman and later a country doctor, and Nellie Edith Wise, a schoolteacher.

Education

Allport graduated second in a class of one hundred from Glenville High School, Indiana, in 1915. He received a Master of Arts in 1921 and a Ph. D in 1922, both from Harvard. From 1922 to 1924 he visited Europe on a Harvard fellowship. In his first year he attended the universities of Berlin and Hamburg, where he met the influential psychologists Wolfgang Köhler, Louis William Stern, Carl Stumpf, Heinz Werner, and Max Wertheimer, whose ideas had an enduring impact. His second year was spent at Cambridge, England. On his way back from Turkey to graduate school, Allport met Sigmund Freud, an encounter he later described as a "traumatic development episode. "

Career

Allport served as an instructor of social ethics at Harvard from 1924 to 1926. From 1926 to 1930 Allport was assistant professor of psychology at Dartmouth and also taught summer classes at Harvard. He returned to Harvard as assistant professor of psychology (1930-1937), associate professor (1938-1942), and, thereafter, professor.

Allport's most influential book, a gracefully written volume entitled Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (1937), stressed the normal rather than the pathological. It was standard reading for twenty-five years and was revised as Patterns and Growth in Personality in 1961. In the book, Allport stated that the goal of the new science of personality was to derive a better understanding of a person than could be gleaned by using "unaided common sense" alone. In the chapter "The Ability to Judge People, " he wrote that the best way to measure progress toward this goal was by the accuracy of predictions made about the feelings, thoughts, and actions of the subject.

Allport's ideas were quick to gain popularity and stimulated considerable research. The results invariably showed that psychologists were no better than laymen in their predictive accuracy and that psychological training did not improve accuracy. The book also introduced the controversial concept of the functional autonomy of motives, which held that adult motives are infinitely varied because, although they grow out of earlier motives, they become independent of them. His book described fifty-two ways of studying personality, including the use of gestures and graphology, but emphasized the central importance of the single-case method.

In 1933 Allport wrote, with P. E. Vernon, Studies in Expressive Movement. In 1939 Allport was elected president of the American Psychological Association. His presidential address, "The Psychologist's Frame of Reference, " presented trends in psychological research that were based on a content analysis of 1, 600 articles in the fourteen most important journals published between 1888 and 1938. The analysis showed declines in studies of social betterment, of single cases, and of comprehensive theories. It showed an increase in studies concerned with "diminutive theories implemented with great precision, " and a striking rise in the employment of statistical aids, the use of animal subjects, and the spread of physiological research. Allport concluded that "operationism is the current watchword of an austere empiricism. "

Allport's own approach was counter to all these trends. He was a global but imprecise theorizer. His quantitative contributions were limited to widely used inventories for measuring differences in ascendancy that he developed with his brother, Floyd, and to a scale for measuring differences in religious, theoretical, social, economic, political, and religious values that he developed with P. E. Vernon. He did no work with animals or in physiological psychology. He was neither an applied nor a clinical psychologist. Allport viewed theories and methods as means for solving significant human problems. In 1956 he examined the South African racial issue as a visiting consultant for the Institute for Social Research. He predicted that white supremacy would not be maintained.

Allport's national and international visibility and influence continued to rise. In 1944 he became president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. He gave Lowell Lectures in Boston, Terry Lectures at Yale, and the Hoernle Lecture in South Africa. He became a member of the National Committee for UNESCO, a member of the Social Science Research and National Research Councils, and director of the National Opinion Research Center.

Many of Allport's publications concerned with social issues were collaborations with students. Among these was The Psychology of Radio (1935), with Hadley Cantril; Personality Under Social Catastrophe (1941), with Jerome S. Bruner and E. M. Jandorf; and The Psychology of Rumor (1947), with Leo J. Postman. Allport stressed the importance of using many methods to study one person. His most original contribution in this area was The Use of Personal Documents in Psychological Science (1942), in which he analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of using autobiographies, diaries, letters, and artistic creations as ways of understanding an individual. Allport viewed theory as a means to improve the understanding of a particular person. Letters from Jenny (1965) was an effort to apply this view. It began with 300 letters written by a mother over a twelve-year period, largely about her relationship with her son.

Allport provided a variety of theoretical analyses, none of which he considered entirely satisfactory, of the mother's personality and problems. Allport considered differential, Gestalt, organismic, and personalistic theories as especially relevant for understanding individual lives. The best known of his writings in this area is The Individual and His Religion (1950). While psychologists became increasingly involved in problems that individuals and society regard as important, by the late 19806, researchers in psychology did not follow Allport's lead. Rather, the trends he identified in 1939 accelerated. Diminutive theories implemented with precision gave way to even more diminutive theories implemented with still greater precision. The use of sophisticated statistical analysis continued to expand, and animal and physiological research dominated many more research journals.

Consequently, Allport, who was a major influence on psychology in his time, was little known to graduate students in 1988. Following the trend, their research became increasingly theory-centered and method-centered. Studies of the ability to understand a person as measured by predictive accuracy that Allport advocated largely faded from the research scene. Psychology made little progress toward the goal that Allport set for it--predicting the single person more accurately than can be done by common sense alone.

Achievements

• Allport contributed to the formation of values scales and rejected both a psychoanalytic approach to personality, which he thought often was too deeply interpretive, and a behavioral approach, which he thought did not provide deep enough interpretations from their data. He emphasized the uniqueness of each individual, and the importance of the present context, as opposed to past history, for understanding the personality. 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. In 1963 he received the Gold Medal of the American Psychological Foundation.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Personality Traits: Their Classification And Measurement

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • The Individual and His Religion: A Psychological Interpretation

    (Examines the role of subjective religion in the total per...)

  • The Nature of Prejudice

    (earlier version of Allport's book)

  • A B C's of Scapegoating
  • The Person in Psychology: Selected Essays by Gordon Willard Allport (1968-06-01)
  • The Psychology of Rumor

Religion

Allport maintained a lifelong personal and professional interest in religion.

Views

Allport never regarded himself as anti-Freudian, but he did feel strongly that manifest and conscious motives should be fully explored before probing for latent and unconscious ones.

Connections

On June 30, 1925, Allport married a fellow graduate student, Ada Lufkin Gould, who later worked in clinical psychology. They had one child.

Spouse :

Ada Lufkin (Gould) Allport

Father :

John Edward Allport

Brother :

Floyd Henry Allport

Brother :

Harold Edward Allport

mother :

Nellie Edith (Wise) Allport

Son :

Robert Bradlee Allport