G. Allport Psychology of the Individual Notes PDF

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Gordon Allport was a pioneering psychologist often referred to as one of the founders of personality psychology. He rejected two of the dominant schools of thought in psychology at the time, psychoanalysis and behaviorism, in favor of his own approach that stressed the importance of individual differences and situational variables. Today he is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to the trait theory of personality. In a review of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, Allport was ranked as the 11th most eminent psychologist. Allport's theory of personality emphasizes the uniqueness of the individual and the internal cognitive and motivational processes that influence behavior. For example, intelligence, temperament, habits, skills, attitudes, and traits. Allport (1937) believes that personality is biologically determined at birth, and shaped by a person's environmental experience. Early Life Gordon Allport was born in Montezuma, Indiana, on November 11, 1897. He was the youngest of four brothers and was often described as shy, but also hard-working and studious. His mother was a school teacher and his father was a doctor who instilled in Allport a strong work ethic. During his childhood, his father used the family home to house and treat patients. Allport operated his own printing business during his teen years and served as the editor of his high school newspaper. In 1915, Allport graduated second in his class and earned a scholarship to Harvard College, where one of his older brothers, Floyd Henry Allport, was working on a Ph.D. in psychology. After earning his bachelor's degree in philosophy and economics from Harvard in 1919, Allport traveled to Istanbul, Turkey, to teach philosophy and economics. After a year of teaching, he returned to Harvard to finish his studies. Allport earned his Ph.D. in psychology in 1922 under the guidance of Hugo Munsterberg. Meeting Sigmund Freud In an essay entitled "Pattern and Growth in Personality," Allport recounted his experience of meeting psychiatrist Sigmund Freud. In 1922, Allport traveled to Vienna, Austria, to meet the famous psychoanalyst. After entering Freud's office, he sat down nervously and told a story about a young boy he had seen on the train during his travels to Vienna. The boy, Allport explained, was afraid of getting dirty and refused to sit where a dirty-looking man had previously sat. Allport theorized that the child had acquired the behavior from his mother, who appeared to be very domineering. Freud studied Allport for a moment and then asked, "And was that little boy you?" Effect on Approach to Psychology Allport viewed the experience as an attempt by Freud to turn a simple observation into an analysis of Allport's supposed unconscious memory of his own childhood. The experience would later serve as a reminder that psychoanalysis tended to dig too deeply. Behaviorism, on the other hand, Allport believed, did not dig deeply enough. Instead, Allport chose to reject both psychoanalysis and behaviorism and embraced his own unique approach to personality.

At this point in psychology history, behaviorism had become the dominant force in the United States and psychoanalysis remained a powerful influence. Allport's approach to human psychology combined the empirical influence of the behaviorists with the acknowledgment that unconscious influences could also play a role in human behavior. Career Allport began working at Harvard in 1924 and later left to accept a position at Dartmouth. By 1930, he returned to Harvard where he would remain for the rest of his academic career. During his first year at Harvard, he taught what was most likely the first personality psychology class offered in the United States. His work as a teacher also had a profound effect on some of his students, which included Stanley Milgram, Jerome S. Bruner, Leo Postman, Thomas Pettigrew, and Anthony Greenwald. Contributions to Psychology Allport died on October 9, 1967. In addition to his trait theory of personality, he left an indelible mark on psychology. As one of the founding figures of personality psychology, his lasting influence is still felt today. Rather than focusing on the psychoanalytic and behavioral approaches that were popular during his time, Allport instead chose to utilize an eclectic approach. Overview of Allport’s Psychology of the Individual As a 22-year-old student, Gordon Allport had a short but pertinent visit with Freud in Vienna, a meeting that changed Allport’s life and altered the course of personality psychology in the United States. In Allport’s mature theory, his major emphasis was on the uniqueness of each individual. Allport built a theory of personality as a reaction against what he regarded as the non-humanistic positions of both psychoanalysis and animal-based learning theory. However, Allport was eclectic in his approach and accepted many of the ideas of other theorists. Biography of Gordon Allport Gordon W. Allport was born in Indiana in 1897. He received an undergraduate degree in philosophy and economics from Harvard. After receiving a PhD from Harvard, Allport spent 2 years studying under some of the great German psychologists, but he returned to teach at Harvard. Two years later he took a position at Dartmouth, but after 4 years at Dartmouth, he returned to Harvard, where he remained until his death in 1967. III.

Allport’s Approach to Personality Theory

Answers to three questions reveal Allport’s view of personality theory. (1) What is personality? What is the role of conscious motivation? (3) What are the characteristics of the psychologically healthy person? What Is Personality? Allport defined personality as “the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine [the person’s] behavior and thought.” This definition includes both physical and psychological properties and both stability and flexibility. Also, personality not only is something but it does something; that is, it includes both behavior and thinking. What is the Role of Conscious Motivation?

More than any other personality theorist, Allport recognized the importance of conscious motivation. His emphasis of conscious motivation probably began with his short-lived discussion with Freud, when Allport had not yet selected a career in psychology. Rather than viewing Freud’s comments as an expression of an unconscious motive, Allport believed that Freud missed the point of Allport’s story. Whereas Freud would attribute an unconscious desire in the story of the young boy on the tram car, Allport saw the story as an expression of a conscious motive. What Are the Characteristics of a Healthy Person? Several years before Maslow conceptualized the self-actualizing personality, Allport listed six criteria for psychological health. These include (1) an extension of the sense of self, (2) warm relationships with others, (3) emotional security or self-acceptance, (4) a realistic view of the world. Structure of Personality To Allport, the most important structures of personality are those that permit description of the individual in terms of individual characteristics, and he called these individual structures personal dispositions. Personal Dispositions Allport distinguished between common traits, which permit inter-individual comparisons, and personal dispositions, which are peculiar to the individual. He recognized three overlapping levels of personal dispositions, the most general of which are cardinal dispositions that are so obvious and dominating that they cannot be hidden from other people. Not everyone has a cardinal disposition, but all people have 5 to 10 central dispositions, or characteristics around which their lives revolve. In addition, everyone has a great number of secondary dispositions, which are less reliable and less conspicuous than central traits. any of a number of enduring characteristics that describe or determine an individual’s behavior across a variety of situations and that are peculiar to and uniquely expressed by that individual. Personal dispositions are divided into three categories according to their degree of influence on the behavior of the person possessing them. Cardinal dispositions (or cardinal traits), such as a thirst for power, are so pervasive that they influence virtually every behavior of that person; central dispositions (or central traits), such as friendliness, are less pervasive but nonetheless generally influential and easy to identify; and secondary dispositions (or secondary traits), such as a tendency to keep a neat desk, are much more narrowly expressed and situation specific. Are individual; not shared. Common Traits in the personality theory of Gordon W. Allport, any of a number of enduring characteristics that describe or determine an individual’s behavior across a variety of situations and that are common to many people and similarly expressed. Common traits, such as assertiveness, thus serve as a basis for comparison of one person to another and are distinct from personal dispositions. Shared by several people. Motivational and Stylistic Dispositions Allport further divided personal dispositions into (1) motivational dispositions, which are strong enough to initiate action and (2) stylistic dispositions, which refer to the manner in which an individual behaves and which guide rather than initiate action.

Proprium The proprium refers to all those behaviors and characteristics that people regard as warm and central in their lives. Allport preferred the term proprium over self or ego, because the latter terms could imply an object or thing within a person that controls behavior, whereas proprium suggests the core of one’s personhood. a concept of the self—or that which is consistent, unique, and central in the individual—that was developed by Gordon W. Allport. According to Allport, the proprium incorporates body sense, self-identity, self-esteem, self-extension, rational thinking, self-image, propriate striving, and knowing. ~propriate striving emerges in adolescence with the search for identity and includes the experimentation common to adolescents before making long-range commitments. Motivation Allport insisted that an adequate theory of motivation must consider the notion that motives change as people mature and also that people are motivated by present drives and wants. A Theory of Motivation To Allport, people not only react to their environment, but they also shape their environment and cause it to react to them. His proactive approach emphasized the idea that people often seek additional tension and that they purposefully act on their environment in a way that fosters growth toward psychological health. Functional Autonomy Allport’s most distinctive and controversial concept is his theory of functional autonomy, which holds that some (but not all) human motives are functionally independent from the original motive responsible for a particular behavior. Allport recognized two levels of functional autonomy: (1) perseverative functional autonomy, which is the tendency of certain basic behaviors (such as addictive behaviors) to perseverate or continue in the absence of reinforcement: and (2) propriate functional autonomy, which refers to self-sustaining motives (such as interests) that are related to the proprium. According to Allport, a behavior is functionally autonomous to the extent that it seeks new goals, as when a need (eating) turns into an interest (cooking). Not all behaviors are functionally autonomous, and Allport listed eight such processes: (1) biological drives, such as eating, breathing, and sleeping; (2) motives directly linked to the reduction of basic drives; (3) reflex actions such as an eye blink; (4) constitutional equipment such as physique, intelligence, and temperament; (5) habits in the process of being formed; (6) patterns of behavior that require primary reinforcement; (7) sublimations that can be tied to childhood sexual desires, and (8) some neurotic or pathological symptoms. The Study of the Individual Allport strongly felt that psychologists should develop and use research methods that study the individual rather than groups. Morphogenic Science Allport favored morphogenic procedures over nomothetic ones. Morphogenic investigations study only one person at a time person and are opposed to nomothetic methods that study large numbers

of people. Presently, nearly all psychology studies investigate groups of people. Allport’s two most famous morphogenic reports were the diaries of Marion Taylor and the letters from Jenny. The Diaries of Marion Taylor In the late 1930’s, Allport and his wife became acquainted with diaries written by a woman they called Marion Taylor. These diaries, along with descriptions on Marion Taylor by her mother, younger sister, favorite teacher, friends, and a neighbor provided the Allports with a large quantity of material that could be studied using morphogenic methods. However, the Allports never published this material. Letters From Jenny Even though Allport never published data from Marion Taylor’s dairies, he did publish a second case study—that of Jenny Gove Masterson, whose son had been Gordon Allport’s college roommate. During the last 11 1/2 years of her life, Jenny wrote a series of 301 letters to Gordon and Ada Allport (although Allport tried to hide the identity of the young couple who had received these letters). Two of Gordon Allport’s students, Alfred Baldwin and Jeffrey Paige, used a personal structure analysis and factor analysis respectively, while Allport used a common-sense approach to discern Jenny’s personality structure as revealed by her letters. All three approaches yielded similar results, suggesting that morphogenic studies can be reliable. VII. Related Research Allport believed that a deep religious commitment was a mark of a mature person, but he also saw that many regular church-goers did not have a mature religious orientation and were capable of deep racial and social prejudice. In other words, he saw a curvilinear relationship between church attendance and prejudice. That is, people who score high on the intrinsic scale of the Religious Orientation Scale (ROS) tend to have overall better personal functioning than those who score high on the Extrinsic scale. Early studies found that some highly religious people had high levels of psychological health, whereas others suffered from a variety of psychological disorders. The principal difference between the two church-going groups is one of intrinsic versus extrinsic religious orientation; that is, people with an intrinsic orientation tend to be psychologically healthy, but those with an extrinsic orientation suffer from poor psychological health. The Religious Orientation Scale This insight led Allport to develop and use the Religious Orientation Scale to assess both an intrinsic orientation and an extrinsic orientation toward religion. Allport and Michael Ross (1967) found that people with an extrinsic orientation toward religion tend to be quite prejudiced, whereas those with an intrinsic orientation tend to be low on racial and social prejudice. Religion, Prayer, and Health Recent research has fond a consistent relationship between religious involvement and health. Attending church regularly tends to be associated with feeling better and living longer (Powell, Shahabi, & Thoresen, 2003). Kevin Masters and his colleagues (2005) studied religious orientation and cardiovascular health. They found that, as they predicted, those with an intrinsic religious orientation did not have the same increases of blood pressure in reaction to moderate stress as those with an extrinsic orientation did. These results demonstrated that an intrinsic religious orientation serves as a buffer against the stressors of everyday life. Timothy Smith and colleagues (2003) reviewed all the research on religion and depression to see whether religion could also serve as a buffer against depression. Their findings generally supported Allport’s view that there are good and bad ways to be religious: The more intrinsically oriented toward religion a person is, the less likely

the person is to experience depression; the more extrinsically oriented, the more likely a person is to be depressed. The conclusion is that while religion can be good for one’s health, it is important to be religious for the right reasons in order to derive health benefits. Prejudice Reduction: Optimal Contact Allport conducted some research himself on the topic of reducing prejudice, and he proposed the contact hypothesis, stating that more contact under optimal conditions was one of the most important components to reducing prejudice (Allport, 1954). Thomas Pettigrew, one of Allport’s students, has continued the work on prejudice that Allport began (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006; Tropp & Pettigrew, 2005). Pettigrew and Linda Tropp reviewed more than 500 studies testing Allport’s contact hypothesis. They found that the four specific criteria originally outlined by Allport are indeed essential to reduction of prejudice. They also found that while the concept of optimal contact was originally a way to reduce racial prejudice, it also works to reduce prejudice toward the elderly and the mentally ill (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). While Allport’s ideas continue to enrich research in personality psychology, his methods for prejudice reduction additionally have enriched the lives of people who have benefited, perhaps without knowing it, from his deep commitment to reducing prejudice in our society. Prejudice and Stereotyping When prejudice occurs, stereotyping, discrimination, and bullying may also result. In many cases, prejudices are based on stereotypes. A stereotype is a simplified assumption about a group based on prior experiences or beliefs. Stereotypes can be positive ("women are warm and nurturing") or negative ("teenagers are lazy"). Stereotypes can not only lead to faulty beliefs, but they can also result in both prejudice and discrimination. According to psychologist Gordon Allport, prejudice and stereotypes emerge in part as a result of normal human thinking. In order to make sense of the world around us, it's important to sort information into mental categories. "The human mind must think with the aid of categories," Allport explained. "Once formed, categories are the basis for normal prejudgment. We cannot possibly avoid this process. Orderly living depends upon it." VIII. Critique of Allport Allport wrote eloquently about personality, but his views are based more on philosophical speculation and common sense than on scientific studies. As a consequence, his theory rates low on its ability to organize psychological data and to be falsified. It rates high on parsimony and internal consistency and about average on its ability to generate research and to help the practitioner. Concept of Humanity Allport saw people as thinking, proactive, purposeful beings who are generally aware of what they are doing and why. On the six dimensions for a concept of humanity, Allport rates higher than any other theorist on conscious influences and on the uniqueness of the individual. He rates high on free choice, optimism, and teleology and about average on social influences. ~~

Trait Theory of Personality Allport is perhaps best known for his trait theory of personality. He began developing this theory by going through a dictionary and noting every term he found that described a personality trait. After compiling a list of 4,500 different traits, he organized them into three different trait categories, including: Cardinal Traits: These are traits that dominate an individual's entire personality. Cardinal traits are thought to be quite rare. These are traits that dominate an individual’s whole life, often to the point that the person becomes known specifically for these traits. People with such personalities can become so well-known for these traits that their names are often synonymous with these qualities. Consider the origin and meaning of the following descriptive terms: Machiavellian, narcissistic, Don Juan, Christ-like, etc. Allport suggested that cardinal traits are rare and tend to develop later in life. Central Traits: Common traits that make up our personalities. Traits...