Bio: (1897-1967) American social psychologist. In 1922, he received his doctorate in psychology from Harvard. In 1924, Allport began teaching at Harvard, but two years later left Harvard to be an assistant professor in psychology at Dartmouth College. In 1930, Allport returned to Harvard, where he stayed for the rest of his career, and eventually, in 1938, became the head of Harvard's psychology department. He contributed to the establishment of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and Harvard’s Department of Social Relations. Allport also, assisted his brother Floyd, also an influential psychologist, in editing the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. He was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1939.

In his research and writing Allport employed equal focus on both methods and theory, and he advocated for the use of both ideographic (individual) and nomothetic (universal) methods in psychology. Allport gave great importance to personal documents as a source of data for social sciences but also devised experimental procedures for studying rumors, eidetic imagery, expressive movement, effects of radio, and others.  

His greatest contribution to social psychology is his theory of personality, which was also the focus of his doctoral dissertation. Allport’s theory of personality was first presented to a wider audience in his book Personality: a Psychological Interpretation (1937). He continued to develop his theory of personality in subsequent books Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality (1955) and Pattern and Growth in Personality (1961). In the development of his personality theory, he rejected the psychoanalytic approach, which he considered too “deep”, but also rejected the behavioral approach, as too superficial. 

In his first book on personality Allport presented his definition of personality: “Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustments to his environment.” (Allport, 1937:48). In a latter book Allport slightly changed that definition: “personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychological systems that determine his characteristic behavior and thought” (Allport 1961: 28).  

He emphasizes each person's individuality and believed that the current context is more important for understanding a person than previous experiences. He studied prejudices as historical, cultural, and psychological phenomena. Personality has several characteristic features – personality has active, dynamic, and constantly changing and evolving organization; personality is a “psychophysical” system, reflecting both mind and body, and including latent and active sentiments, habits, attitudes, and dispositions; personality doesn’t include all behavior, but only determining tendencies; the personality of every individual is unique; personality is lead by rationality, proaction, and consciousness. Personality has evolutionary significance, as it serves to adapt an individual to his or her environment and even master that environment. Allport stated that a maladaptive personality is the product of abnormal conditions in the environment. 

The most important aspect of personality is “traits”. Traits are aspects or attributes of personality that represent readiness and determining tendencies for various forms of individual inner and outer behavior. Allport defined traits as: a generalized and focalized neuropsychic system (peculiar to the individual), with the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent, and to initiate and guide consistent (equivalent) forms of adaptive and expressive behavior. (Allport 1937: 295). Traits are relatively independent of each other. In the research for the book Personality (1937), Allport minutely studied one edition of Webster’s Dictionary and identified 17,953 words that could be considered personality traits.     

Traits that develop in an individual during childhood become functionally autonomous in adult individuals. That means that traits that arise as a product of developmental processes and experiences become independent of them in adults. Similarly, traits that have developed and were functional in one type of situation, can have other functions in other situations. He distinguishes individual traits or “personal dispositions” (that are found in some individuals in society) and common traits that are shared by the majority of the people in some societies and cultures.    

Allport divides all traits into three categories based on how important they are to an individual: cardinal, central, and secondary traits. Cardinal traits dominate the entire life of an individual and define that person. Central traits are general characteristics and central dispositions that are important for an individual. Secondary traits are related to an individual’s preferences or attitudes.

According to Allport newborn babies have no personality, but they acquire it through subsequent processes of differentiation, integration, maturation, and learning. At the start child differentiates adaptive and efficient patterns of behavior; then it starts to integrate those behaviors into its actions; after that child starts to mature physically and learns how to adapt to its environment. These developmental processes progress in a child through stages: “(1) a sense of bodily self, (2) a sense of continuing identity, (3) a sense of self-esteem or pride, (4) the extension of self, (5) a self-image, (6) a sense of self as rationally able to cope, and finally, in adolescence, (7) a sense of “directedness” or “intentionality.””.Allport introduces a concept of “proprium”, that is a part of the “self”. While self is both the object and the knower of the object, proprium is only a part of the self that is the object. Because he stressed importance of values for the development of personality Allpord constructed a personality test known as The Study of Values.

Allport introduced the six characteristics that represent ideally mature personality: 1) extension of the sense of self (interest outside themself); 2) warm relating of self to others (capacity for tolerance, love and intimacy, and avoidance of negative interpersonal behavior); 3) emotional security (self-acceptance); 4) realistic perception of the world and other people; 5) self-objectification (having great introspection and capacity to laugh at own flaws); and 6) the unifying philosophy of life (having a purpose to life and orientation to morals and values).  

Allport’s other great contribution to psychology is his study of stereotypes and prejudice in the book The Nature of Prejudice (1954). In this book, Allport studies the history of prejudice, the psychological effect on the victims of prejudice, the psychological and cognitive origins of prejudice, conditions that propagate prejudice, and practical solutions for mitigating prejudices. He defines prejudice as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization” (Allport 1954: 9).

In the book Studies in Expressive Movement (1933), Allport studied what he considered the second level of personality (the first or “inner” level consists of personality traits) that is related to expressive behavior that is freely emitted by an individual, like gestures, walking, doodling, etc. Allport questioned Froudian's look at the aggression which saw aggression as a steam boiler that heats up until it explodes and ends in catharsis. He proposed a view of aggression as a feedback model that feeds on itself, meaning that acting on aggression only increases the chances of new aggressive behavior, and thus propagates itself. This view of aggression has implications for Allport’s understanding of prejudices. He questioned the hypothesis that contact between different groups is sufficient to induce prejudice and concluded that adverse situational conditions in intergroup interactions are necessary for prejudices to arise and propagate. Conditions that influence lessening intergroup tensions and prejudice are: equal status in the situation, common goals, no intergroup competition, and authority sanction. Allport didn’t see prejudice just as a product of cognitive distortions and dissonance but as a natural extension of normal cognitive processes. Reacting to the empirical findings that nonreligious people are less prone to have prejudices Allport introduced the distinction between the “institutionalized” religious viewpoint, which promotes prejudices, and the “interiorized” religious outlook where internalized religious beliefs lead to less prejudices.  

Main works

Studies in Expressive Movement (1933);

The Psychology of Radio (1935); 

Personality: a Psychological Interpretation (1937); 

The Nature of Prejudice (1954);

Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality (1955);

Pattern and Growth in Personality (1961); 

Letters from Jenny (1965);

“Personal Religious Orientation and Prejudice”, in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1967);  

The Person in Psychology: Selected Essays (1968).