Gordon Allport is widely known in the field of psychology mainly because he is one of the pioneers and founders of personality theory.

Not being satisfied with the behavioral vision of the North American psychology nor with the European psychoanalysis, it chose to combine the best of both perspectives, considering that it was necessary to start from an empirical vision not without interpreting the results of the investigations. His main theory, in which he highlights how he categorizes traits according to 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 through this short biography of Gordon Allport .

Biography of Gordon Allport

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.

First years and training

Gordon Willard Allport was born in Montezuma, Indiana, United States, on November 11, 1897 , although his family had to move to the state of Ohio a few years later. He was the youngest brother in a family of four children, whose parents were a schoolteacher and a doctor, who had set up their own home clinic.

Thanks to his father’s work, Gordon Allport had contact with the nurses and patients in his clinic, as well as learning some useful facts about medicine, although it was never the career he decided 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, the young Allport was a person who, although a worker, was characterized by being very reserved and isolated . During his adolescence he took care of his own printing business, as well as collaborating as an editor in his high school newspaper. As a result of her outstanding commitment to her studies, Allport managed to graduate second in her 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 doctorate in psychology from Harvard.

However, the young Gordon Allport did not study 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 the Robert College of the careers he had just graduated from.

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

Contact with Freud

After obtaining his doctorate, Allport had the opportunity to visit Austria in 1922. While 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 to him a case he had encountered while traveling by train.

Sitting in the vehicle, he had come across a boy who was with his mother, who was afraid of getting dirty, refusing to sit in the place where a man of not very neat appearance had previously sat. 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 hearing the case, Freud stared at Allport in thought, then asked, “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 at Dartmouth, New Hampshire. However, in 1930 he returned to his alma mater where he would remain for the rest of his academic life. While there he had a great influence on some of his students, such as Stanley Milgram, Jerome Bruner or Leo Postman .

In the years he worked at Harvard University he became a prominent 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), in addition to also being president of 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.

Vision on Psychology

As a result of his contact with Sigmund Freud, Gordon Allport was able to see how the Austrian psychoanalyst made a simple anecdote seen in an everyday place into an analysis in search of a deep trauma or repression in the American’s memory. 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 the behaviourism proposed by other great psychologists such as Burrhus Frederic Skinner.

With respect to psychoanalysis, Allport considered that it tended to go too deep based on events of worldly life, without necessarily being related to the life of the patient.

In contrast, in relation to behaviorism, which was the dominant view in the United States, Allport thought that it focused too much on results without putting them in context, without giving a minimum role to unconscious processes that could explain the behavior.

On this basis, Allport did not completely reject both visions, but opted for an eclectic perspective combining what he understood psychoanalysis and behaviorism to offer.

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, noting every word that referred to a personality trait. This laborious task concluded with finding about 4,500 words related to personality , categorizing them into three types of traits:

1. Cardinal features

The cardinal features constitute the core of the person, affecting and defining to a great extent his or her wide repertoire of behaviours. Therefore, they are the ones that have the greatest weight in his personality.

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

2. Central features

The central features are sets of characteristics that influence the person’s behaviour 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 break-up or being mugged.

This whole set of factors in the Allport theory tries to understand personality as something complex, each person being shaped by a unique set of traits

Bibliographic references:

  • Allport, G.W. (1961). Pattern and Growth in personality. New York: Holt.
  • Bermúdez, J. (1996). G.W.’s personalistic theory. Allport. In Bermúdez, J.(Ed.) Psicología de la personalidad. Madrid: UNED.
  • Hernangómez, L. & Fernández, C. (2012). Personality and Differential Psychology. Manual CEDE de Preparación PIr, 07.