Floyd Henry Allport

Floyd Henry Allport (1890 to 1978) was an American psychologist often called the father of experimental social psychology. Born in Milwaukee, he took his Harvard doctorate in 1919, taught at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, and in 1924 joined the new Maxwell School at Syracuse University, where he remained until 1957 and helped start the first doctoral program in social psychology. His textbook Social Psychology (1924) treated the field as an experimental science centred on the behaviour of individuals, measured attitudes and studied social influence, conformity and group norms; he coined the terms social facilitation and producing tendency. His brother Gordon W. Allport was also a psychologist.