MIDTERM SCKWRK twelve zero two (seventy-two) TRAIT PARADIGM GORDON ALLPORT (eighteen ninety-seven to nineteen sixty-seven): PSYCHOLOGY OF INDIVIDUALS

MIDTERM SCKWRK twelve zero two (seventy-two) TRAIT PARADIGM GORDON ALLPORT (eighteen ninety-seven to nineteen sixty-seven): PSYCHOLOGY OF INDIVIDUALS

Gordon Allport was born on November eleven, eighteen ninety-seven, in Montezuma, Indiana, USA. His father was a physician, while his mother was a teacher. The youngest child of four brothers, he was independent and too young to be his brothers' playmates.

Allport ranked second in a class of one hundred high school graduating students. He admitted to initially being "uninspired and uncurious and having no idea of what to do next. His interest in social ethics and social service, acquired from his parents, was reinforced at Harvard, where he volunteered with the boys' club. He received his Master of Arts in nineteen twenty-one and his Doctor of Philosophy in psychology from Harvard University in nineteen twenty-two. His dissertation was "An Experimental Study of the Traits of Personality." He married a clinical psychologist whom he met as a graduate student.

Allport was elected president of the American Psychological Association and received many awards, including the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal and the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution. He was the first personality theorist to study the psychologically healthy individual. His own childhood experiences mirrored his later theory. Out of boyhood conditions, isolation, and rejections, he compensated by trying to excel. As Gordon matured, he began to identify himself out of envy of his older brother Floyd, by choosing the same course and obtaining a Doctor of Philosophy as his brother did. This idea of a compensatory mechanism was formalized in his concept of Functional Autonomy.

Together with Leo Postman, Allport authored: Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (nineteen thirty-seven), Reaction Study and Study of Values, Pattern and Growth in Personality (nineteen sixty-one), and Psychology of Rumor (nineteen forty-seven).

Gordon Allport taught at Harvard University until his death on October nine, nineteen sixty-seven.

VIEW OF HUMAN NATURE

Allport's theory is known as the Trait Theory because he emphasized the nature and evolution of personality traits. His theory is also called the Psychology of Individuals because it emphasizes a person's uniqueness.

For Allport, motivation is always a contemporary process. An individual's current self-image is more important than whatever he or she has been in the past (except in pathological cases). No central motive, even for abnormal personalities, is ever totally independent of the contemporary ego structure. The most withdrawn catatonic will speak, upon recovery, of events he or she attempted but ultimately failed to respond to during the deepest state of their catatonic condition.

The most important driving force of human beings is not the past but what the person is doing at present for his or her future. However, not all individuals seem to guide their behavior in terms of rational principles.

Allport ran counter to the current generally accepted practice of assuming that all behaviors have a continuum basis. For him, many aspects of life are not on a continuum; what we do is not always a matter of degree but one with a difference in kind. Where there appears to be a continuum, it is actually a continuum of symptoms and not processes. Appearances can be deceiving.

Allport found great differences in the lives of people. A human being is not a continuum of another human being, but must be considered an entity of and by itself.

Allport suggested a discontinuity between the child and adult motivational structure, which creates, in effect, two theories of personality. The theory of personality for the child is based on tension reduction, avoidance of pain, seeking pleasure, and a biological model. Some infant behavior can be instinctive or reflexive. The adult personality operates from a matrix of organized and highly focused traits. The adult no longer derives power from organic, primitive sources but from the functional autonomy motivating system.