Gordon Allport Motivation and Personality

chapter 7 Gordon Allport: Motivation and Personality As the individual matures, the bond with the past is broken. —Gordon Allport Allport Brings Personality into the Classroom and the Psychology Lab The Importance of the Infant–Mother Bond Allport Challenges Freud Allport Makes Each Person Unique The Healthy Adult Personality The Life of Allport (1897–1967) Restrictions, Morality, and No Bright Colors Isolation and Rejection Inferiority College Years Allport Meets Freud Becoming a Success The Nature of Personality The Roles of Heredity and Environment Two Distinct Personalities for Two Stages of Life Questions about Human Nature Assessment in Allport’s Theory The Personal-Document Technique The Study of Values Research on Allport’s Theory Expressive Behavior Cultural Differences in Facial Expressions Computer Recognition of Facial Expressions Reflections on Allport’s Theory Personal Dispositions Questions and Criticisms Recognition and Influence Motivation: What We Strive for Chapter Summary Functional Autonomy Review Questions Personality Development in Childhood: The Unique Self Suggested Readings Personality Traits Stages of Development Allport Brings Personality into the Classroom and the Psychology Lab During a career that spanned more than four decades, Gordon Allport made personality an academically respectable topic. Psychoanalysis and the personality theories that derived from it that we have discussed so far were not considered part of mainstream scientific psychology. The formal and systematic study of personality was not recognized by the psychology establishment until Allport published Personality: A Psychological Interpretation in 1937. The book was an immediate success and became a classic in the study of personality. Thus, Allport served two purposes: He helped bring personality into the mainstream, and he formulated a theory of personality development in which traits play a prominent role. Allport Challenges Freud Allport challenged Freud’s psychoanalysis on several points. First, Allport did not accept the notion that unconscious forces dominate the personality of normal mature adults. He argued that emotionally healthy people function rationally and consciously, aware and in control of many of the forces that motivate them. According to Allport, the unconscious is important only in the behavior of neurotic or disturbed people. Second, with regard to historical determinism—the importance of the past in determining the present—Allport said that we are not prisoners of childhood conflicts and past experiences, as Freud believed. Instead, we are guided more by the present and by our view of the future. Allport wrote that people are “busy leading their lives into the future, whereas psychology, for the most part, is busy tracing them into the past” (Allport, 1955, p. 51). Third, Allport opposed collecting data from abnormal personalities. Whereas Freud saw a continuum between the normal and abnormal, Allport saw a clear distinction. To Allport, the abnormal personality functioned at an infantile level. The only proper way to study personality, he believed, was to collect data from emotionally healthy adults. Other populations, such as neurotics, children, and animals, should not be compared with normal adults. No functional similarity in personality existed between child and adult, abnormal and normal, or animal and human, as far as he was concerned. Allport Makes Each Person Unique Another distinguishing feature of Allport’s theory is his emphasis on the uniqueness of personality as defined by each person’s traits. He opposed the traditional scientific emphasis on forming general constructs or laws to be applied universally. He argued that personality is not general or universal but is particular and specific to the individual. The Life of Allport (1897–1967) Restrictions, Morality, and No Bright Colors Born in Montezuma, Indiana, Allport was the youngest of four sons. His mother was a teacher, and his father was a salesman who decided to become a doctor. They were in such dire financial circumstances while the elder Allport attended medical school in Baltimore that he smuggled drugs from Canada into the United States and sold them to support the family. When the law came knocking on the front door, he skipped out the back and escaped over a fence. He took the family to Indiana and opened a private practice in which Allport believed his own birth was his father’s first case. The devout religious beliefs and practices of Allport’s mother dominated the household. No smoking, drinking, dancing, or card playing were allowed, nor could a family member wear bright colors, distinctive clothing, or jewelry of any kind. Allport wrote that his mother was “on the severe side with a strong sense of right and wrong and quite strict in her moral ideals” (quoted in Nicholson, 2003, p. 17). Isolation and Rejection Too young to be a playmate to his older brothers, Allport was isolated from children outside the family as well. “I fashioned my own circle of activities,” he wrote later. “It was a select circle, for I never fitted the general boy assembly” (Allport, 1967, p. 4). “I suffered agonies on the playground. I never really got on with my brothers. They didn’t like me and they weren’t kind and I couldn’t possibly compete with them. They were all a little more masculine in type than I was” (quoted in Nicholson, 2003, p. 25). He described himself as skillful with words but not good at sports or games and as someone who worked hard to be the center of attention of the few friends he did have. In Allport’s personality theory, one of the major propositions is that psychologically healthy adults are unaffected by childhood events. Perhaps reflecting this belief, Allport revealed very little about his childhood years. What he did tell, however, demonstrates a parallel between his own early experiences and the theory he later developed. Inferiority Arising from his childhood conditions of isolation and rejection, Allport developed inferiority feelings for which he attempted to compensate by striving to excel. He wrote about the identity quest that resulted from his inferiority feelings with regard to his brothers and other children. As Allport grew older, he began to identify with his oldest brother, Floyd, envious of his brother’s accomplishments. Well into adulthood, Gordon Allport continued to feel inferior compared to Floyd, whose achievements he tried to emulate. He followed Floyd to Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in psychology, just as Floyd had done. Floyd became a noted social psychologist, and even when Gordon was becoming well known himself in the field, the feelings of being in his brother’s shadow persisted. At the age of 31, Gordon wrote that he had “published several articles of no great importance and [was] not to be confused with my more eminent brother” (quoted in Nicholson, 2003, pp. 168–169). The attempt to emulate Floyd may have threatened Gordon’s sense of identity. To assert his individuality, Gordon Allport may have been motivated to refute his identification with Floyd by declaring in his personality theory that his adult motives and interests were independent of his childhood feelings. He later formalized this idea as the concept of functional autonomy. College Years Although Allport ranked second in his high school graduating class of 100, he admitted to being uninspired about what to do next. At the end of the summer of 1915, he applied to Harvard and was accepted. He wrote, “Overnight my world was remade.” Allport’s college years were a great adventure for him as he discovered new frontiers of intellect and culture. But shocked by low grades on his first exams, he doubled his efforts and finished the year with straight A’s. Allport’s interest in social ethics and social service, acquired from his parents, was reinforced at Harvard. He did volunteer work for a boy’s club, a group of factory workers, and a contingent of foreign students. He also worked as a probation officer. He found these activities satisfying because he genuinely liked to help people. “It gave me a feeling of competence, to offset a generalized inferiority feeling.” He believed this kind of service reflected his search for an identity (Allport, 1967, pp. 5–7). He took several undergraduate courses in psychology but at that time did not intend to pursue a career in the field. He graduated in 1919 with a bachelor’s degree, on the same day Floyd received his Ph.D. After graduation, Gordon spent a year on the faculty of Robert College in Istanbul, Turkey, and later accepted the fellowship Harvard offered for graduate study in psychology. His biographer noted, “The thought of becoming a psychologist and perhaps becoming more like his successful brother appealed to Allport” (Nicholson, 2003, p. 67). Allport Meets Freud On his return trip to the United States, Allport stopped in Vienna to see one of his brothers. While there, he sent a note to Sigmund Freud and received an invitation to visit the great man. When Allport entered Freud’s office, he found Freud waiting patiently, expecting the young American to explain the purpose of his visit. The awkward period of silence lengthened until an uncomfortable Allport, looking desperately for something to say, blurted out an account of an incident he had seen on the streetcar ride to Freud’s office. He told of watching a small boy who had an obvious fear of dirt. Everything seemed dirty to the child. He even changed his seat, telling his mother not to let a dirty man sit beside him. Freud studied the prim, proper, carefully groomed young man and asked, “Was that little boy you?” By asking this question, Freud was expressing his belief that the story Allport told betrayed his own unconscious fears and conflicts. Allport appeared to Freud to be “neat, meticulous, orderly and punctual—possessing many of the characteristics [he] associated … with the compulsive personality” (Pervin, 1984, p. 267). Another psychologist commented that “Freud just hit [Allport] right on the head, right on the nose” (quoted in Anderson, 1990, p. 326). Allport was shaken by Freud’s question. For the rest of his life, Allport denied that he was the super-clean, proper little boy in the story but the incident clearly left a deep impression on him. Years later he wrote, “My single encounter with Freud was traumatic” (Allport, 1967, p. 22). He suspected that psychoanalysis probed the unconscious too deeply, as Freud tried to do with him. Psychology, Allport decided, should pay more attention to conscious or visible motivations. This was the path he chose for his study of personality. Many years later, two American psychologists used this Freud story in a study, which found that the use of this kind of anecdote made classroom lectures, and presumably textbooks as well, more enjoyable to students. As a result, they found that students learn and remember information better when it is presented in this kind of social and personal context (Kaufman & Bristol, 2001). Becoming a Success Allport completed his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1922, after two years of graduate study. His dissertation, “An Experimental Study of the Traits of Personality,” foreshadowed his lifelong work and was the first research ever to be conducted on personality traits in the United States. Awarded a traveling fellowship, Allport spent two years studying with noted psychologists in Germany and England. He returned to Harvard as an instructor, offering a course on the psychological and social aspects of personality, which was apparently the first formal American college course on the subject. He spent nearly four decades at Harvard, conducting research on personality and social psychology and instructing several generations of students. Considered an elder statesman in the field, Allport received many awards, including the American Psychological Foundation’s Gold Medal, the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, and the presidencies of the American Psychological Association and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.