Gordon Allport

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Gordon Allport.

Gordon Willard Allport (born November 11, 1897 in Montezuma , Indiana , USA, † October 9, 1967 in Cambridge , Massachusetts , USA) was an American psychologist and founder of the Allport scale .

Allport was Professor of Social Psychology at Harvard University from 1933 to 1966 .

He is considered to be the co-founder of humanistic psychology and the concept of functional autonomy with emphasis on the independence of the personality's motivational system from the underlying primary drives, which he advocated in contrast to behaviorism .

Life

Allport grew up as the youngest of four brothers in Glenville near Cleveland , Ohio. His father was a country doctor. One of his older brothers was Floyd Henry Allport , who studied psychology at Harvard while Gordon studied economics there from 1915 to 1919. He then taught English and sociology at Robert College in Constantinople for a year . In 1920 he met Sigmund Freud in Vienna . Back at Harvard, he studied psychology for two years and earned his Ph. D. in 1922 with a thesis on personality traits . His first scientific work, Personality Traits - Their Classification and Measurement , appeared in 1921. He received a scholarship for a two-year study visit to Europe, which he spent in Hamburg, Berlin and Cambridge. One of his professors in Hamburg was William Stern . In 1924 he returned to Harvard, where he initially worked as a lecturer in social ethics . From 1926 to 1930 he was an assistant professor of psychology at Dartmouth College before moving back to Harvard.

In 1933 Allport was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Work areas

Prejudice research

With his work The Nature of Prejudice , he created the basis for research into prejudices . In the work, he listed anti-African American, anti-Semitic , anti- Catholic and sexist resentments as examples of prejudice. Allport developed many other, later generally accepted theories and models in the work. One of them is e.g. B. the Common Ingroup Identity Theory , a theory to reduce prejudice. The Nature of Prejudice is one of the most widely read books in the history of social psychology , and has been translated into many languages. Scientific databases show that it had been cited at least 15,000 times by 2012.

Personality psychology

Together with William Stern , Allport was one of the founding fathers of the personality psychology department. As a representative of the idiographic approach, he demanded from personality psychology that it should primarily deal with the uniqueness of a person and their individual-specific structure and dynamics. As a suitable unit of analysis, he suggested “personal disposition”, by which he understood properties that apply only to a specific individual and thus characterize his or her uniqueness. For Allport, personality is not a fiction or an imaginary concept, but a real unit. He distinguished between continuous and discontinuous personality theories. He himself tended more towards a discontinuous personality theory. Allport's definition of personality was:

"Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his characteristic behavior and thought."

Allport established a hierarchy of personal traits . He calls personality traits of a person, which determine their behavior in most situations, cardinal traits . This includes the central traits , which determine the behavior of the person in many situations. The secondary traits below that determine sometimes and in more peripheral areas, such as B. with personal preferences for a certain fashion or music, the behavior of the person.

Religious Psychology

With the Religious Orientation Scale , Allport and JM Ross created a scale for evaluating people's religious orientation in 1967. An intrinsic and an extrinsic religious orientation are recorded independently of each other.

Fonts (selection)

  • Driven hunt for scapegoats. (ABC's of scapegoating). Ed. And edit. by Knud Knudsen. 4th ext. Edition. Christian, Bad Nauheim 1968.
  • Personality. Structure, development and apprehension of human characteristics. Klett, Stuttgart 1949.
  • Becoming the personality. Thoughts and foundations of a psychology of personality. Kindler, Munich 1974, ISBN 3-463-18127-4 .
  • Shape and growth in personality. Anton Hain, Meisenheim 1970.
  • Carl F. Graumann (ed.): The nature of prejudice. (Study library). Translated by Hanna Graumann. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1971, ISBN 3-462-00826-9 .

literature

  • Ian Nicholson: Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood. American Psychological Association, 2003, ISBN 1-55798-929-X .
  • Peter Glick, John Dovidio, Laurie A. Rudman (Eds.): On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years After Allport. Blackwell Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1-4051-2750-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. Bernardo J. Carducci: The Psychology of Personality - Viewpoints, Research, and Applications , Blackwell Publishing, 2nd ed., 2009, p. 259
  2. ^ John S. Bowman: The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography , Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 13
  3. M. Amelang et al: Differential Psychology and Personality Research. Kohlhammer Verlag, 2006.
  4. For a summary of the contact hypothesis see: Gordon W. Allport: The nature of prejudice. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1971, p. 285 f. Original in English: Gordon W. Allport: The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley, Cambridge 1954.
  5. Samuel Salzborn (Ed.): Classics of the Social Sciences - 100 Key Works in Portrait , Springer VS Fachmedien, Wiesbaden, 2014, pp. 174 to 178
  6. Philipp Y. Herzberg and Marcus Roth: Personality Psychology , Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden, 2014, page 148
  7. Hannelore Weber and Thomas Rammsayer (eds.): Handbook of Personality Psychology and Differential Psychology , Hogrefe Verlag, 2005, pages 129 and 130
  8. Barbara Engler: Personality Theories , Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 2009, p. 264
  9. ^ Gordon Allport, Pattern and Growth in Personality , Harcourt College Publishing, 28
  10. Jeffrey Nevid: Psychology - Concepts and Applications , Houghton Mifflin Company, 2009, p. 488

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