Gordon Allport

Gordon William Allport (1897 to 1967) was an American psychologist and one of the first to make the study of personality a field of its own, so that he is often called a founding figure of personality psychology. He worked on values scales and turned away from both the psychoanalytic approach, which he found too deeply interpretive, and the behavioral approach, which he thought drew too shallow a reading from its data. In their place he built an eclectic theory based on traits, stressing the uniqueness of each individual and the weight of present context over history. His influence came partly from his habit of framing broad topics such as rumor, prejudice, religion and traits, and partly from the lasting impression he made on students at Harvard University, among them Jerome Bruner, Stanley Milgram and Thomas Pettigrew. His brother Floyd Allport was also a social psychologist, and a 2002 survey ranked Allport the eleventh most cited psychologist of the twentieth century.