Allport’’s Psychology of the
emotional security or self-acceptance, and
Individual
Gordon Willard Allport
Was born on November 11, 1897 at Montezuma, Indiana, United States
and died on October 9, 1967 at Cambridge, Massachusetts, United
States.
He was the youngest of four siblings and was known for being timid,
hardworking, and studious.
His mother was a teacher, and his father was a doctor, both of whom
instilled a strong work ethic in Allport.
During his childhood, his father housed and treated patients at the
family home.
In his adolescence, Allport had his own printing firm and was the editor
of his high school newspaper.
Allport finished second in his class in 1915 and received a scholarship at
Harvard College, where one of his older brothers, Floyd Henry Allport,
was pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology.
After graduating from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in philosophy
and economics in 1919, Allport went to Istanbul, Turkey, to teach
philosophy and economics.
He returned to Harvard to finish his studies after a year of teaching.
In 1922, Allport received his Ph.D. in psychology under the supervision
of Hugo Munsterberg.
Psychology of Individual
 Gordon Allport was a pioneering psychologist and one of the founders
of personality psychology.
 His theory of personality stresses the individual's individuality as well as
internal cognitive and motivational processes that drive behavior.
Intelligence, temperament, habits, skills, attitudes, and qualities, for
example.
 Personality, according to Allport (1937), is biologically defined at birth
and shaped by a person's environment.
Personality
 Allport described personality as "the dynamic organization within the
individual of those psychophysical processes that affect [the person's]
behavior and thought," which encompasses both physical and
psychological characteristics, as well as stability and flexibility.
 Furthermore, personality is not only something, but it is also something
that does something; that is, it encompasses both conduct and thought.
Role of Conscious Motivation
 Allport, more than any other personality theorist, understood the
significance of conscious motivation.
 His emphasis on conscious motivation most likely originated with a brief
conversation with Sigmund Freud when Allport had not yet decided on
a career in psychology.
 Rather than seeing Freud's remarks as an indication of an unconscious
motive, Allport thought Freud misunderstood the point of Allport's
story.
 Unlike Freud, who understood the story of the little boy on the tram
vehicle as an expression of an unconscious desire, Allport saw it as an
expression of a conscious motive.
Characteristics of a Healthy Person
 Allport established six requirements for psychological health some years
before Maslow developed the self-actualizing personality.
 These include:
1. a sense of self extension,
2. warm interpersonal interactions,
3.
4. A realistic worldview.
Structure of Personality
 The most significant structures of personality, according to Allport, are
those that allow the individual to be described in terms of individual
qualities, which he refers to as personal dispositions.
Personal Dispositions
 Allport distinguished between common qualities that allow for inter-
individual comparisons and personal dispositions that are unique to
each person.
 He identified three degrees of personal dispositions that overlapped,
the most general of which are cardinal dispositions, which are so clear
and overwhelming that they can't be disguised from others.
 Although not everyone has a cardinal disposition, everyone has 5 to 10
central dispositions, or qualities that revolve around their lives.
 Furthermore, everyone possesses a large number of secondary
dispositions that are less reliable and visible than central features.
Three (3) classifications based on the degree of influence they have on the
behavior of the person who possesses them:
1. Cardinal dispositions (or cardinal traits), such as a desire for power, are
so pervasive that they influence virtually every aspect of that person's
behavior;
2. Central dispositions (or central traits), such as friendliness, are less
pervasive but still widely influential and easy to spot; and
3. Secondary dispositions (or secondary traits), such as a desire to keep a
tidy desk, are much more narrowly expressed and situation specific. Are
unique; they are not shared.
Common Traits
 Any of a number of persistent qualities that describe or determine an
individual's conduct across a variety of contexts and that are common
to many people and similarly expressed, according to Gordon W.
Allport's personality theory.
 Assertiveness, for example, is a common attribute that can be used to
compare one person to another but is separate from personal
dispositions.
Motivational and Stylistic Dispositions
 Personal dispositions are further classified by Allport into:
1. motivational dispositions, which are powerful enough to initiate
action, and
2. Stylistic dispositions, which pertain to an individual's behavior and
guide rather than initiate action.
Proprium
 All of the actions and qualities that people perceive as warm and central
in their lives are referred to as the proprium.
 Allport favored the term proprium to self or ego because the latter
terms can connote an item or thing within a person that influences
conduct, whereas proprium connotes the heart of one's humanity.
 Gordon W. Allport established the concept of the self, or that which is
consistent, unique, and central in the individual.
 Body sense, self-identity, self-esteem, self-extension, logical thinking,
self-image, appropriate striving, and knowledge are all included in the
proprium, according to Allport.
 Appropriate striving emerges in adolescence with the search for identity
and includes the typical adolescent experimenting before making long-
term commitments.
  All three methods produced identical results, indicating that
morphogenic research may be trusted.
Motivation
 Allport emphasized that an acceptable theory of motivation must take
into account the fact that people's motivations vary as they grow older,
as well as the fact that people are driven by their current impulses and
desires.

A Theory of Motivation
 People, according to Allport, not only react to their surroundings, but
also form them and induce them to react to them.
 His proactive approach highlighted the premise that people frequently
seek out greater tension, and that they intentionally engage on their
surroundings in a way that promotes psychological health growth.

Functional Autonomy
 His idea of functional autonomy, which maintains that certain (but not
all) human motives are functionally independent from the originating
purpose accountable for a particular behavior, is Allport's most
distinctive and divisive concept.
 Allport identified two types of functional autonomy:
1. perseverative functional autonomy, which refers to self-sustaining
motives (such as interests) that are related to the proprium; and
2. Appropriate functional autonomy, which refers to self-sustaining
motives (such as interests) that are related to the proprium.
 According to Allport, a behavior is functionally autonomous to the
extent that it seeks new goals, as when a need (eating) turns into an
interest (cooking).
 Not all behaviors are functionally autonomous, and Allport listed eight
such processes:
1. biological drives, such as eating, breathing, and sleeping;
2. motives directly linked to the reduction of basic drives;
3. reflex actions such as an eye blink;
4. Constitutional equipment such as physique, intelligence, and
temperament;
5. habits in the process of being formed;
6. patterns of behavior that require primary reinforcement;
7. sublimations that can be tied to childhood sexual desires, and
8. Some neurotic or pathological symptoms.

Morphogenic Science
 Allport preferred morphogenic over nomothetic techniques.
 Morphogenic investigations focus on a single individual at a time, as
opposed to nomothetic approaches, which look at huge groups of
people.
 Almost all psychology research now focus on groups of people.
 Marion Taylor's journals and Jenny's letters were two of Allport's most
famous morphogenic reports.
The Diaries of Marion Taylor
 Allport and his wife were acquainted with diaries written by a woman
they called Marion Taylor in the late 1930s.
 These journals, as well as descriptions of Marion Taylor by her mother,
younger sister, favorite teacher, friends, and a neighbor, supplied the
Allports with a vast amount of material to study utilizing morphogenic
methods.
 The Allports, on the other hand, never released this content.
Letters from Jenny
 Despite the fact that Allport never released the data from Marion
Taylor's diaries, he did publish a case study of Jenny Gove Masterson,
whose son had been Gordon Allport's undergraduate roommate.
 Jenny wrote 301 letters to Gordon and Ada Allport during the last 11
1/2 years of her life (although Allport tried to hide the identity of the
young couple who had received these letters).
 Alfred Baldwin and Jeffrey Paige, two of Gordon Allport's pupils,
employed personal structure analysis and factor analysis, respectively,
while Allport used a common-sense method to figure out Jenny's
personality structure as revealed by her letters.