GORDON ALLPORT

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS PERSONALITY

There are few words in the English language that have such a fascination for the general public as the term personality. Although the word is used in various senses, most of these popular meanings fall under one of two headings. The first use equates the term to social skill or adroitness. An individuals personality is assessed by me effectiveness with which he or she is able to elicit positive sense that the teacher who refers to a student as presenting a personality problem is probably indicating mat his or her social skills are not adequate to maintain satisfactory relations with fellow students and the teacher. A person may thus he said to have an “aggressive personality” or a “submissive personality” or a “fearful personality”.

GORDON W. ALLPORT BIOGRAPHY 

Allport, one of the four sons of a physician, was born in Indian in 1897 but grew up in Cleveland, Where he received his early education in public schools. He completed his undergraduate work at Harvard University at the same time his older brother played was a graduate student in psychology at the same University. After securing an A.B in 1919 with a major in economics and philosophy, Allport spent a year at Robert College in Istanbul teaching sociology and English. He then returned to Harvard and completed the requirements for the Ph.D in Psychology in 1922. During the next two years he studied in Berlin, Hanburg and Cambridge, England. Thus extensive experience in forview academic settings must have played some part in developing the start interest in international affairs that has been so evident in Allport’s activities during his long career. It also led to Allport serving for a decade or more as one of the chief interpreters of German psychology in America. Returning from Europe he accepted an appointment an instructor in the Department of Social Ethics at Harvard University. Again there seems to be a continuity between this first American teaching appointment and Allport’s persistent concern with problems imbued with social and ethical implications. At the end of two years he accepted on appointment as assistant professor of psychology at Dartmouth college but was invited to return to Harvard in 1930 where he remained until his death October 9, 1967, one mouth before his seventeenth birthday. The year  prior to his death he was appointed the first Richard Cabot Professor of Social Ethics. Allport  was one of the central figures in the interdisciplinary movement that led to the formation of the Department of social relations at Harvard University in an attempt to effect a partial integration of psychology, sociology, and anthropology.

Against the backward of Muse many years of college teaching it should come as no supervise that in much of his professional writing Allport displayed a deliberate didactic intent. In contrast to most technical writes, whose primary goal appears to be the construction or irresproachable statements defy the efforts of the coitic to find a tooth hold, Allport seemed much more interested in expressing issued in a salient, provocative fashion. This sometimes led to overstatement or else or focusing upon a particular issue to the relative exclusion of other pertinent question. Thus, it might be said that Allport is one of the mast hotly criticized of psychological theorists, but in the same breath it should be mentioned that questions Allport raised have usually become matters of general concern to psychologists.

During his career Allport received virtually every professional honor that psychologists have to effort. He was elected president of the American psychological Association, President of the Eastern psychological Association study of social issues. In 1963 he was awarded the gold medal of the American psychological formation and in 1964 he received the award of the American psychological Association for distinguished scientific contributions. The breadth and diversity of his scholarly work are clearly evident in the dozen books and the innumerable monographs, articles, forwards, and reviews he wrote, often in collaboration with other psychologists. He was also the coauthor of two widely used tests. The A-S reaction study and A study of values.

Allport’s emphases on rationality, unity of the personality, and discontinuities, as well as his repudiation of any mechanistic, natural science approach starkly illustrate his departure from Freud. In many respects, his is the first non-Freudian model of personality. The contrast will become even sharper when we encounter his rejection of childhood determinism in favor of future goals and present concerns, as well as his focus on the psychologically mature individual. For Allport, it was more a matter of our all being mature to some extent, rather than all being neurotic to some extent.

SUMMARY OUTLINE

Overview of Allport’s psychology of the individual Gordon Allport, whose major emphasis was on the uniqueness of each individual, built a theory of  personality as a reaction against what he regarded as the non-humanistic positions of both psycho analysis and animal based learning  theory. However, Allport was elecitic in his approach  and accepted many of the ideas of other theorists.

ALLPORT’S APROACH TO PERSONALITY

Allport believed that psychologically healthy humans are motivated by present, mostly conscious drives and that they not only seek to reduce tensions but to establish new ones. He also believed that people are capable of practive behavior, which suggests that  they can consciously behave in new and creative ways that foster their own change and growth. He called his study of the individual morphogenic science and contrasted it with traditional homothetic methods. 

PERSONALITY DEFINED

Allport defined personality as “The dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his characteristic behavior and thought”

THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF PERSONALITY 

Allport published two major formulations of his viewpoint the first in personality. A psychological interpretation (1937), the second in pattern and growth in personality (1961); Between 1937 and 1961, Allport made a number of conceptual and terminological changes in his theory. The present account is based upon his 1961 volume whenever that differs from the 1937 book and upon articles he published subsequent to 1961 that further modified or elaborated his theory.

Gordon Allport’s eclecticism is nowhere better reflected than is the rich variety of concepts he was willing to accept as playing some useful role in the description of human behavior. He considered concepts as segmental as specific reflexes and as broad as cardinal traits or the proprium to possess some importance in understanding behavior and he saw the process referred to by these concepts as operating within the organism in a hierchical fashion the mast detailed statements of this theory, Allport (1937,  1961) suggested that each of the following concepts possess some utility conditioned reflex, habit, trait, and personality.

Although all of the above concepts are acknowledged and conceded a certain importance, the major emphasis of the theory is upon traits, with attitudes and intentions given an almost equivalent status. Indeed, Allport’s theory is often referred to as a trait psychology. Within this theory, traits occupy the position of the major motivational constrict. What the need was the murray and the instinct to Freud, the trait was to Allport. Before proceeding to a more detailed consideration of the trait concept, let us examine Allport’s definition of personality.

TRAIT THEORY

In this 1937 statement, Allport differentiated between individual and common traits but included both of them under a single definition. This resulted in some confusion and ambiguity, so in 1961. Allport made some terminological alterations and provided separate definitions for what he had formerly called individual trait. Allport also referred to personal dispositions or Morphogenic traits.

A trait is defined as a ‘neuropsychic structure having the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent, and to initiate and guide equivalent forms of adaptive and expressive behavior. A personal disposition of morphogenic trait is defined as a “generalized neuropsytimuli functionally with the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent and to initiate and guide consistent.

One may wonder then why it is necessary to have to definitions. The answer  lies in the implications for empirical research with the concept of common traits one may make what Allport calls comparative studies of the same traits, one may make what Allport walls comparative studies of the same trait as expressed in different although the end of such research is the specification of complex traits.

CARDINAL CENTRAL AND SECONDARY DISPOSITONS

As we have indicated personal dispositions represent generalized predispositions to behavior. There remains the question of whether all dispositions possess roughly the same degree of generally and if not how to distinguish between the varying degree. Allport suggested a distinction between cardinal, central and secondary personal dispositions. A cardinal disposition is so general that almost every act of a person who possess one seems traceable to its influence. This variety of disposition is relatively unusual and not to be observed in many people. More typical are the central and dispositions which represent tendencies highly characteristics of the individual, are often called into play, and are very easy to infer, Allport suggested that the number of central disposition by which a personality can be fairly accurately know is surprisingly few perhaps five to ten. The secondary disposition is more limited in its occurrence, less crucial to a description of the personality and more focalized in the responses it leads to as well as the stimuli to which it is appropriate.

Allport discussed other crucial questions regarding traits and dispositions. Do they serve to guide or direct behavior only or do they also have a role in initiating or instingating behavior?  There is no simple answer to this question. Some traits are clearly more impelling have a more crucial motivational role, than others. Thus, among traits there is considerable further we may reasons that in one sense there is always a previous stimulation that is related to the activation of the trait, for example, an external stimulus or an internal state of some sort must always precede the operation of the trait. However it is clear that most traits are not pallid reflectors of external stimuli. In fact, the individual actively seeks stimuli that make appropriate the operation of the trait. The person with a marked disposition toward  sociability does not wait for a suitable situation in which to express this trait, rather he or she creates situations in which to interact with people.

A further consideration is the independence of traits. To what extent so they exist as systems of behavior that operate without regard for systems ? Is operation of a particular trait always conditioned by and relative to other traits and their state? Allport Agoned that trait is identifitable not by its rigid independence but rather by  its focal quality.

It is clear that the influenced involved in identifying a trait imply consistency. Thus, be definition, a disposition is known only by virtue of certain regularities or consistencies in the manner in which an individual behaves. Allport was quick to point out that his theory of traits does not necessitate a complete consistency. The  mere fact that there are multiple, overlapping traits simultaneously active suggests that apparent in consistencies in the organisms behavior may be expected relatively frequently. Further the fact that dispositions are uniquely and individually organized implies that they may include elements that would appear inconsistent when viewed from a normative or external viewpoint. Thus, we may observe apparent inconsistency. It is less the observation of exact correspondence or consistency in behavior that is implied. By Allport’s memory than it is the existence of a subtole congruence that writes frequently in a fashion difficult to detect, the various behavioral manifestation of the individual. It is not implied that every personality is perfectly integrated. Dissociation and repression may exist in every life. But there is ordinarily more consistency than the customary methods of psychological investigation are equipped to discover.

CONCLUSION :-

An interesting and useful outgrowth of Allport’s interest in traits  is his painstaking categorization of roughly eighteen thousand termsk taken from an unabridged dictionarily. In collaboration with odbert these terms were classified primarily in terms of whether they represented authentic traits of personality, present activities or evaluative terms. 18 thousand terms obviously are unmanageable as a taxonomy of personality. In addition, Allport was not interested in developing a set of common traits to be applied across individuals. Interestingly, these  terms plus the underlying assumption that the ways in which individuals can differ will be indexed in the language of the culture.

REFERENCES

1.      Theories of personality (4^th edition)

Calvin S. Hall

Gardner Lindzey

John B. Campbell

2.      Wikipedia.org/wiki Gordon Allport