Gordon Allport

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Lore & Background

Gordon Allport was born in Montezuma, Indiana, on November 11, 1897, the youngest of four sons of John Edward and Nellie Edith Allport. His father was a country doctor who turned their home into a makeshift hospital, with patients and nurses residing there. Allport reported that 'Tending office, washing bottles, and dealing with patients were important aspects of my early training' (p. 172). His mother, a former school teacher, forcefully promoted her values of intellectual development and religion. As a teenager, Allport developed and managed his own printing business while serving as editor of his high school newspaper. In 1915, he graduated second in his class at Glenville High School, earning a scholarship to Harvard University, where his older brother Floyd Henry Allport was working on his Ph.D. in psychology. Allport earned his A.B. in Philosophy and Economics in 1919. The following year, he traveled to Europe and visited Sigmund Freud in Vienna. He did graduate work at the University of Berlin and the University of Hamburg before teaching at Robert College in Istanbul, Turkey. He then returned to Harvard to become an instructor in social ethics before studying psychology on a fellowship in 1920. His first publication, 'Personality Traits: Their Classification and Measurement' in 1921, was co-authored with his brother Floyd. Allport earned his master's degree in 1921 and his Ph.D. in 1922. After teaching at Dartmouth College for four years (1926 to 1930), he returned to Harvard and remained there for the rest of his career. He married Ada Lufkin Gould, a clinical psychologist, and they had one son who became a pediatrician. Allport helped establish personality as a psychological research type within American psychology from 1921 through 1937. He died of lung cancer on October 9, 1967, at the Stillman Infirmary of Harvard University.

Reader's Guide

Gordon Allport's significance lies in his foundational role in personality psychology and his development of trait theory. He rejected both psychoanalytic and behavioral approaches, arguing that psychoanalysis was too deeply interpretive and behaviorism did not provide deep enough interpretations from their data. Instead, he developed an eclectic theory based on traits, emphasizing the uniqueness of each individual and the importance of present context over personal history. Allport compiled a list of 4,500 trait-like words from the dictionary and organized them into three levels: cardinal traits (rare, dominating passions), central traits (general characteristics found in some degree in every person), and secondary traits (characteristics seen only in certain circumstances). His work contributed to the lexical hypothesis and the formation of values scales. Allport had a profound and lasting influence on the field of psychology, partly from his knack for exploring and broadly conceptualizing important topics (e.g., rumor, prejudice, religion, traits) and partly from the deep impression he made on his students during his long teaching career. Among his many students at Harvard were Jerome S. Bruner, Anthony Greenwald, Stanley Milgram, Leo Postman, Thomas Pettigrew, and M. Brewster Smith. A 2002 survey ranked Allport as the 11th most-cited psychologist of the 20th century. He published key works including The Individual and His Religion (1950), The Nature of Prejudice (1954), and Becoming: Basic Considerations for Psychology of Personality (1955). He also served as President of the American Psychological Association in 1939 and received the Gold Medal Award from the American Psychological Foundation in 1963.

Did You Know?

• Allport visited Sigmund Freud in Vienna in 1920, the year after earning his A.B. degree.
• His father, Dr. J. Edward Allport, was criticized in Samuel Hopkins Adams' exposé for diagnosing and treating morphine addicts by mail, sending doses of medicine that analysis revealed contained only additional morphine and pink whiskey.
• Allport graduated second in his class at Glenville High School in 1915, earning a scholarship to Harvard University.
• He was the second youngest person ever elected President of the American Psychological Association in 1939.
• Allport's first publication, 'Personality Traits: Their Classification and Measurement' (1921), was co-authored with his older brother Floyd Henry Allport.