Gordon Allport: biography of this personality psychologist

Gordon Allport he is widely known in the field of psychology especially for being one of the pioneers and founders of personality theory.

Not conforming to the behaviorist vision of North American psychology nor to European psychoanalytic psychology, he opted to combine the better of both perspectives, considering that it was necessary to start from an empirical vision not without interpreting the results of the research. His main theory, in which he highlights how he categorizes traits based on their weight in the person, is perhaps the best known of his intellectual legacy.

Let's take a closer look at the life of this American psychologist via this short biography of Gordon Allport.

• Related article: "History of Psychology: authors and main theories"

Gordon Allport Biography

Allport has had an active professional life, working for the prestigious Harvard University, in addition to making visits abroad and offering great contributions to psychology.

Early years and training

Gordon Willard Allport was born in Montezuma, Indiana, United States, on November 11, 1897.

, although his family had to move a few years later to live in the state of Ohio. He was the youngest brother in a family of four children, whose parents were a school teacher and a doctor, who had set up his own clinic in the home.

Thanks to the work of his father, Gordon Allport had contact with the nurses and patients of his clinic, in addition to learning some useful facts about medicine, although it was never the career he decided on to study. As for his mother, she marked him by offering her strong Protestant values, which influenced Allport's life in terms of his vision of the good ethics that a psychologist should follow.

In his youth, young Allport was a person who, although hard-working, is characterized by being very reserved and isolated. During his teens he ran his own printing business, as well as serving as an editor on his high school newspaper. As a result of his outstanding academic efforts, Allport managed to graduate second in his class in 1915, earning a scholarship to Harvard University. At that same university was his older brother, Floyd Henry, who later became a famous social psychologist. Gordon Allport received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard.

But nevertheless, the young Gordon Allport did not dedicate himself to studying psychology from the beginning, opting for the studies of philosophy and economics, finishing them in 1919. Later, he had the opportunity to leave the United States to go to Istanbul, Turkey, to teach at Robert College in the careers from which he just graduated.

His first publication, co-authored with his brother, Personality Traits: Their Classification and Measurements was published in 1921, already making him an important figure in the field of personality psychology while he was still a doctoral student. Subsequently, returned to Harvard for a doctorate in psychology in 1922 under the tutelage of Hugo Münsterberg.

Contact with Freud

After completing his doctorate, Allport had the opportunity to visit Austria in 1922. Being in the Bavarian country, he went to Vienna to pay a visit to one of the most famous psychologists in history: Sigmund Freud. In the psychoanalyst's office, Allport, who was nervous about being in front of one of the greats, began to explain a case whom he had met traveling by train.

Sitting in the vehicle, he had met a child who was with his mother, who was afraid of get dirty, refusing to sit in the place where a not very fixed. Based on this fact, Allport explained to Freud that he had hypothesized that the boy had acquired this phobia from his mother, who had a domineering appearance.

After listening to the case, Freud looked at Allport thoughtfully, and then asked 'and was that child you?'

Professional life and last years

Gordon Allport began working as a professor at the same university where he had received his doctorate in 1924, although he later went to work in Dartmouth, New Hampshire. Nonetheless, in 1930 he returned to his alma mater where he would remain for the rest of his academic life. Being there he exerted great influence on some of his students, such as Stanley Milgram, Jerome Bruner or Leo Postman.

In the years that he worked at Harvard University he became a notable and influential member of the institution, working there until 1967. In 1931 he participated in the committee that was in charge of inaugurating the sociology department of that university.

in 1939 he had the honor of being elected as president of the American Psychological Association (APA), as well as for the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. In the late 1940s he became one of the editors of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.

Gordon Allport died while still a Harvard professor on October 9, 1967, at the age of 69.

View on psychology

Following contact with Sigmund Freud, Gordon Allport was able to see how the Austrian psychoanalyst made a simple anecdote seen in an everyday place was an analysis in search of a deep trauma or repression in the memory of the North American. This visit to Vienna was an important event in Allport's life, since it was a reason to be critical of psychoanalysis, but also of behaviorism proposed by other great psychologists such as Burrhus Frederic Skinner.

Regarding psychoanalysis, Allport considered that it tended to delve too deeply based on events of worldly life, without even necessarily being related to the life of the patient.

Instead, in relation to behaviorism, which was the dominant view in the United States, Allport thought that he focused too much on the results without contextualizing them, without giving a minimal role to the unconscious processes that could explain the conduct.

Based on this, Allport did not completely reject both visions, but instead opted for an eclectic perspective. combining what he understood best offered by psychoanalysis and behaviorism.

personality trait theory

One of Gordon Allport's great contributions to the field of psychology is his study of personality and the explanations behind it. He developed this theory by consulting the English dictionary, writing down each word that referred to a personality trait. This laborious task concluded with the discovery of nearly 4,500 words related to personality, categorizing them into three types of traits:

1. cardinal traits

The cardinal traits constitute the core of the person, affecting and defining most of the person's wide repertoire of behaviors. Therefore, they are the ones that have the greatest weight in their personality.

Basically, would be defined in terms of obsessions or passions what the person wants to do, such as gaining fame, being very rich, having a large family.

2. core traits

The central features are sets of characteristics that influence a person's behavior in different contexts. Among them would be honesty, kindness, sociability, among many others.

3. secondary traits

The secondary traits would not be part of the general personality of the individual, but they can appear in certain very specific contexts, such as a sentimental breakup or being robbed.

All this set of factors of Allport's theory try to understand personality as something complex, each person being configured by a series of unique traits.