Early Life
Gordon Allport was born in Indiana, on November 11, 1897. He was the youngest of four brothers and had a shy personality. Although shy Allport was both hard working and studious. Both of Allport’s parents instilled a strong work ethic into him. Allport's father was a doctor and throughout Gordon Allport's childhood his father used the family home to treat and house his patients. In his teenage years Gordon Allport operated his own printing business and served as the editor of his high school newspaper.
Love received and love given comprise the best form of therapy
EDUCATION
Allport graduated high school in 1915 and earned a scholarship to Harvard University college. His older brother Floyd Henry Allport was working on a Ph.D. in psychology at the time. After earning his bachelor’s degree in philosophy and economics from Harvard in 1919, Gordon Allport traveled to Istanbul to teach philosophy and economics. However, after only a year of teaching, he returned to Harvard to complete his studies. In 1922 Gordon Allport earned his Ph.D. in psychology.
LATER LIFE
Gordon Allport was one of the original Psychologists to focus on the study of personality. Gordon Allport is regularly referred to as one of the founding figures in the area of personality psychology. He contributed to the formation of value scales and rejected both a psychoanalytical and behavioural approach to personality.
Allport often thought that the psychoanalytic approach to personality was too deeply interpretive. He also believed that a behavioural approach did not provide deep enough interpretations of the data. Allport emphasized the uniqueness of everyone, and the importance of the present context as opposed to history for understanding personality.
Gordon Allport is best known for the concept that, although adult motives develop from infantile drives, they become independent of them. He called this concept functional autonomy. Gordon Allport’s approach favoured emphasis on the problems of the adult personality, instead of infantile emotions and experiences.
One of Allport’s early projects involved him going through the dictionary and locating every term which he thought could describe an individual. As a result of this project Allport developed a list of 4500 trait like words. He organised these into three levels of traits. A cardinal trait is the trait that dominates and shapes a person's behaviour. A central trait is a general characteristic found in some degree in every person. Secondary traits are characteristics seen only in certain circumstances.
Allport hypothesized the idea of internal and external forces that can influence the way an individual may behave. He called these forces Genotypes (Internal forces) and Phenotypes (external forces). Allport was also one of the first researchers to draw a distinction between the terms ‘Motive’ and ‘Drive’. Allport suggested that a drive forms as a reaction to a motive.
Whilst attending a meeting with Sigmund Freud, Allport told the story of encountering a boy on the train that was afraid of getting dirty. Allport described how the boy refused to sit down near anyone dirty. After studying Allport for a minute, Freud asked, “And was that little boy you?"