by DK
In the early 20th century, the two predominant schools of psychology—psychoanalysis and behaviorism—were polar opposites in approach. Both were highly developed and influential schools that remain powerful (as well as enduringly controversial) to this day. Behaviorism, being interested only in how we acquire (or learn) our behavior, had nothing to say about personality; while psychoanalysis offered an in-depth approach, arguing for the existence of an unknowable unconscious that controls personality but reveals itself only fractionally and accidentally by slips of the tongue and in dream symbols.
The American psychologist Gordon Allport had fundamental problems with both of these approaches. He thought that behaviorism was wrong to discount the “person” doing the learning, because each person is unique and their perception is part of the process. He also considered psychoanalysis to be inadequate for explaining personality and behavior because it placed too much importance on a person’s past, ignoring their current context and motivations. His view was affirmed when, as a young college graduate, he paid a visit to Sigmund Freud in Vienna. On first meeting, to make small talk, Allport told Freud of a small boy he had met on the train on the way, who was afraid of getting dirty and refused to sit near anyone dirty, despite his mother’s encouragement. Perhaps, Allport suggested, the child had learned this dirt phobia from his mother, a neat and rather domineering woman. Freud then asked, “And was that little boy you?” Freud’s reduction of this small observation of Allport’s to some unconscious episode from his own childhood seemed, to Allport, dismissive of all his current motivations and intentions. Throughout his work, Allport emphasizes the present over the past, though later in his life he paid more attention to psychoanalysis as a supplement to other methods.
Allport argued for an approach to the study of human learning and personality that was reasoned, eclectic, and conceptually open-minded. He took some of what he believed from prevailing approaches, but his central belief is that the uniqueness of each individual and his or her personality is largely—but not exclusively—forged in human relationships.
"People… are busy leading their lives into the future, whereas psychology, for the most part, is busy tracing them into the past."
Gordon Allport
Theory of personality
Allport’s idea of personality is a complex amalgam of traits, human relationships, current context, and motivation. He identified two distinctly different approaches to the study of personality—the nomothetic and idiographic methods—both of which had been devised by the German philosophers Wilhelm Windelband and Wilhelm Dilthey, but had first been put into practice by Allport’s university tutor, William Stern. The first method, the nomothetic, aims to be as objective and scientific as possible, and it is exemplified in the study of human intelligence. This involves obtaining test results from large populations of people, on personality traits such as extraversion and introversion. Results can be submitted to a sophisticated analysis, resulting in a number of general conclusions, such as the percentages of people who are extravert or introvert, or variations linked to age, gender, or geography. However, this method does not aim to comment in any way on traits at the individual level; it focuses on comparative comments and conclusions about a certain trait, rather than any particular person. This was the method that the behaviorist B.F. Skinner used for his observations of rat behavior.
The second method, the idiographic, stands in direct opposition to the nomothetic method; it studies one individual in breadth and depth, taking into account their biography, their personality traits, and their relationships, as well as how they are seen and experienced by others. This method is much closer to the psychoanalytic method with its focus on one person, one life.
Allport said that while the nomothetic method was a way of describing traits, it had little explanatory power; whereas the idiographic method, though unable to draw any general conclusions, could explain one person in illuminating detail. He was to use both methods, though his work in general is not known for its focus on empirical research; he was more of a theorist, almost a philosopher. Yet his very first paper, Personality Traits: Their Classification and Measurement, cowritten with his brother Floyd, was an excellent example of the nomothetic method. One of his last major pieces of work, the analysis of Jenny Masterson, was an extraordinarily detailed example of the idiographic method.
"Types exist not in people or in nature, but rather in the eye of the observer."
Gordon Allport
The lexical hypothesis
In his first study, Allport and his brother reported their research on personality traits. They asked the participants to complete a personality questionnaire, and to ask three people who knew them well to complete it too; this reflected the Allport brothers’ view that personality is forged in relationship to others. They concluded from their results that there is a case for identifying traits, and for attempting to measure them. They also believed they had proven the possibility of developing a complete and sensitive instrument for the measurement of personality.
In 1936, Allport and his colleague H.S. Odbert proposed that individual differences that are most salient and socially relevant in people’s lives eventually become expressed through language; and the more important the difference, the more likely it is to be expressed as a single word. This idea is known as the lexical hypothesis. The two researchers went on to study the most comprehensive dictionaries of the English language available at the time, to find 18,000 words that described personality. They narrowed this down to 4,500 adjectives that they considered to be observable and stable personality traits.
Allport and Odbert’s lexical hypothesis rested on the idea that the most important and relevant personality differences are reflected by language; they identified 18,000 personality-describing words in English.
"A man can be said to have a trait; but he cannot be said to have a type."
Gordon Allport
Cardinal traits
Based on a further analysis of his lexical study, Allport defined three distinct categories of traits: cardinal, common, and secondary. Cardinal traits are those that are fundamental to a person, governing their entire approach to life. Not everyone has a cardinal trait, according to Allport, but when they do, they may even be famous for them; in fact some people are so famous for them that their name becomes a byword for that trait, giving us terms such as Byronic, Calvinistic, and Machiavellian. On a less iconic scale, a person’s cardinal trait might be something like “a fear of communism,” where this is so central and important to someone that it guides and unifies their life in both conscious and unconscious ways; virtually every act is traceable to its influence.
In his later years, Allport considered a person’s cardinal traits as contributing to the proprium: the essential drives, core needs, and desires of a person. This concept goes beyond the idea of temperament, and is more akin to a guiding purpose that will always press for expression. As an example of the proprium, Allport gave the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, who had one dominant passion from the age of 15: he wanted to be a polar explorer. The obstacles to his ambition seemed insurmountable, and the temptation to relinquish his dreams was great, but the “propriate” striving persisted, and though he welcomed each success, it simply raised his level of aspiration. Having sailed the Northwest Passage, Amundsen embarked upon the project that led to his success in reaching the South Pole. Then, after years of planning and discouragement, he flew over the North Pole. His commitment never wavered, and he eventually died attempting to save the life of a less experienced explorer.
Less fundamental traits
In contrast to cardinal traits, common traits are general characteristics, such as honesty, that are found in most people. These are the building blocks that shape our behavior, but they are less fundamental than cardinal traits. Common traits, Allport said, develop largely in response to parental influences, and are a result of nurture. They are shared among many people within a culture but in varying degrees; aggressiveness, for instance, is a common trait that varies by degrees. According to Allport, most of us have personalities made up of five to ten of these traits at a level whereby they have become our “outstanding characteristics.”
Over time, common traits may achieve “functional autonomy,” by which Allport means that although we start doing something for one reason, we may carry on doing it for quite another. This is because our motives today are not continuously dependent on the past. We may start learning to draw, for instance, to compete in popularity with another child in class, but ultimately become more interested in perfecting the craft for its own sake. This means that how we think and act today is only indirectly affected by our past. Functional autonomy is also thought to explain obsessive and compulsive acts and thoughts: they may be manifestations of functionally autonomous traits, where someone has no idea why he is doing something, but can’t stop himself from doing it.
Allport’s third category of traits, known as secondary traits, exert much less influence on us than cardinal or common traits. They are only seen in certain circumstances, because they are determined by context or situation. For instance, we might say of someone “he gets very angry when tickled” or “she gets nervous on flights.” These traits express preferences or attitudes that are open to change. In the absence of another person, secondary traits might be present but quite invisible. Added to the common and cardinal traits, they provide a complete picture of human complexity.
"Any theory that regards personality as stable, fixed, or invariable is wrong."
Gordon Allport
Traits and behavior
Allport was interested in how traits are forged in a person, and their connection with behavior. He suggested that a combination of internal and external forces influence how we behave. Certain internal forces, which he called “genotypes,” govern how we retain information and use it to interact with the external world. At the same time, external forces, which he named “phenotypes,” determine the way individuals accept their surroundings and how they allow others to influence their behavior. These two forces, he said, provide the groundwork for the creation of individual traits.
Applying these ideas to the story of Robinson Crusoe, Allport saw that, prior to his meeting with Friday, Crusoe’s genotypes, or inner resources, along with some phenotype aspects, helped him to survive alone on a desert island. He had the resilience to overcome his initial despair, and fetched arms, tools, and other supplies from the ship before it sank. He built a fenced-in compound around a cave, and kept a calendar. He hunted, grew corn and rice, and learned to make pottery and raise goats, and he also adopted a parrot. He read the Bible and became religious. These activities demonstrated the expression of Crusoe’s genotypical traits and resulting behaviors.
However, it was only with the arrival of Friday that other aspects of his phenotypic behaviors could find expression: he helped Friday to escape from his captors; he named him; he had the patience and persistence to teach him to speak English, and the capability to convert him to Christianity. While Crusoe always had these personality traits, they remained unexpressed on the island until he formed a relationship with Friday. The idea is similar to a well-known philosophical puzzle: if a tree falls down in a forest, and there is nobody there, does it make a noise? For Allport, traits make behavior consistent; they are always there, even if no one is around to evoke them or witness them in action.
Genotype traits are internal, but phenotype traits are external—they require stimuli from the outside world to make them manifest.
Robinson Crusoe, Allport concluded, must always have had many distinctive personality traits, but some were only uncovered by new circumstances after he was shipwrecked and met Friday.
An idiographic study
After the publication of Personality: A Psychological Interpretation in 1937, Allport turned his attention to the topics of religion, prejudice, and ethics. But in 1965 he returned to the subject of personality by undertaking an idiographic study of the personality traits of Jenny Masterson, who lived from 1868 to 1937. During the last 11 years of her life, Jenny wrote 300 personal letters to a married couple with whom she was friendly. Allport used these letters for his analysis, asking 36 people to characterize Jenny’s personality traits from her letters. Eight trait “clusters” encompassing 198 individual traits were relatively easy to identify, with broad agreement from all the people rating the documents. These traits were: quarrelsome—suspicious; self-centered; independent—autonomous; dramatic—intense; aesthetic—artistic; aggressive; cynical—morbid; and sentimental.
However, Allport concluded that this trait analysis of Jenny was somewhat inconclusive, and so he went on to use a number of other frameworks, including Freudian and Adlerian analysis. Assisted by his students Jeffrey Paige and Alfred Baldwin, he also applied “content analysis” to the material. This was a new form of computerized analysis, where the computer was programmed to count the number of times words or phrases occur that are related to a given topic or emotion. Allport was particularly impressed by this new method because of its potential to analyze idiographic data, confirming his belief that the idiographic approach can identify subtleties of an individual character that trait questionnaires alone cannot reveal.
In 1966, Allport published a paper entitled Traits Revisited suggesting that the aim of personality study should not be the microanalysis of individual traits, but the study of the psychic organization of the whole person. He stated that his early writings about traits were written in an age of psychological innocence, although he maintained his belief that traits are a reasonable starting point for the description of personality.
"Personality is far too complex a thing to be trussed up in a conceptual straight jacket."
Gordon Allport
Allport’s influence
Allport’s work forms the basis of many contemporary schools of thought, though he is rarely credited directly. Much of modern personality testing derives from the work of Raymond Cattell and Hans Eysenck, and both of these psychologists drew upon Allport’s lexical study. Cattell’s “16 Personality Factor Questionnaire,” which is still used by psychologists today, uses 16 traits identified by Cattell through computer analysis of Allport and Odbert’s original 4,500 adjectives.
Humanistic psychology, which forms the basis of most counseling and therapeutic practices, also relies heavily upon Allport’s ideas, particularly his idiographic method and insistence upon the uniqueness of each and every person. Increased focus on the practitioner—client relationship as a vehicle for the expression and development of personality has its roots in Allport’s assertion that personality is largely a function of relationships.
Allport was also one of the first to point out that even those psychological theories that attempt to explore positive human experience are based “largely upon the behavior of sick and anxious people or upon the antics of captive and desperate rats.” He wondered why there were no theories based on the study of healthy human beings, and those who strive to make life worth living. He pointed out that most studies are of criminals, not of law abiders; of fear, not cou
rage; and focus on the blindness of humans, rather than their vision. The burgeoning school of positive psychology, led by Martin Seligman, has taken up this idea and aims to develop a scientific psychology of positive experience.
By 1955, when Allport wrote Becoming, his thinking had developed further; he now saw human striving toward a higher level of consciousness and realization as the true motive of personality. The idea that “becoming” is the ultimate goal of human beings was also developed by the psychologists Carl Rogers and then Abraham Maslow, who renamed it “self-actualization.” Although Allport’s work is cited less often than other well-known figures, he had a profound and lasting influence on the field of psychology.
"Allport urged psychologists to study personality traits and leave character to the province of philosophy."
Martin Seligman
GORDON ALLPORT
Gordon Willard Allport was born in Montezuma, Indiana in 1897. The youngest of four sons, Allport was shy and studious as a child, but as a teenager he became editor of his school newspaper and ran his own printing business.