CHAPTER 7: GOLDON ALLPORT Flashcards
What did Allport believe strongly?
The principles governing the behaviour of nonhuman animals or neurotic humans are different from those governing the behaviour of healthy adult humans.
According to Allport, what were theories of becoming based on?
Upon the behaviour of sick and anxious people or upon the antics of captive and desperate rats.
True or False: Allport was the first to use the term “humanistic psychology.”
True.
What is the dominant theme running through all of Allport’s works?
The importance of the individual.
What did Allport believe in psychological research?
That it should have practical value.
Where and when was Allport born?
In Montezuma, Indiana, on November 11, 1897.
True or False: Allport was the first American-born personality theorist.
True.
Who were Allport’s parents?
His father, John Edwards Allport, was a physician, and his mother, Nellie Edith Wise Allport, was a teacher.
Both had a strong positive influence on him.
What did Nellie Edit Wise Allport encourage out of Goldon Allport?
Encouraged his intellectual curiosity and search for answers.
What was Allport’s belief?
He believed that people reject aggression and hate; he asserted that humans prefer to live a life of peace and love.
Where did Allport grow up in?
Cleveland, Ohio.
Did Allport struggle in Harvard in 1915?
Yes, he barely passed the entrance examination and his early grades were C’s and D’s. He worked hard, however, he finished the year with straight A’s, graduating from Harvard in 1919.
What degree did Allport graduate with?
Major in economics and philosophy.
What did Allport do after graduating?
He spent the next year teaching English and sociology at Robert College in Istanbul, Turkey.
True or False: Did Harvard offer Allport a fellowship to do graduate work in psychology.
True.
What did Allport write to Freud?
Allport asked for permission to visit with him, his permission was granted.
What happened between Allport and Freud upon meeting?
Freud did not speak to Allport.
What was the story Allport told Freud?
“I told him of an episode on the tram car on my way to his office. A small boy about four years of age had displayed a conspicuous dirt phobia. He kept saying to his mother, “I don’t want to sit there. Don’t let that dirty man sit beside me.” To him everything was filthy. His mother was a well-stretched Hausfrau, so dominant and purposive looking that I thought the cause and effect apparent.” Allport stated.
What did Freud respond to Allport’s story?
Freud questioned, “And was that little boy you?”
What did Allport realize when speaking to Freud?
That Freud was accustomed to neurotic defences and that Allport’s manifest motivation (a sort of rude curiosity and youthful ambition) escaped him.
What did Allport conclude after his meeting with Freud?
Depth psychology may siometimes misinterpret events and motives by ignoring obvious information in favour of exploring potential unconscious motives.
What did Allport believe the best way to discover a person’s true motives?
Ask the person about them.
What happened when Allport returned to Harvard?
He earned his MA in 1921 and his PhD in 1922, at the age of 24.
What was Allport’s first publication?
He coauthored with his brother Floyed and it was titled “Personality Traits: Their Classification and Measurement.”
True or False: Did Allport teach a course on personality?
True: In 1923, the first course on personality ever offered in the United States—Personality: Its Psychological and Social Aspects— was taught by Allport.
Who is Ada Lufkin Gould?
A woman Allport married who later became a clinical psychologist.
Who is Robert Brandlee?
Allport’s son who became a paediatrician.
What did Allport do for his entire professional career?
Was at Harvard.
How did Allport die?
Lung cancer.
True or False: Allport served as president of the American Psychological Association.
True.
What was Allport a member of during WW2?
The Emergency Committee in Psychology.
Helped refugee psychologists escaping from Nazi Germany.
Personality.
According to Allport, personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine characteristic behaviour and thought.
What was Allport’s early theorizing influenced by?
Gestalt psychology.
Gestalt psychology.
Emphasized the wholeness and interrelatedness of conscious experience and also ignored the unconscious mind almost completely.
What did Allport distrust?
Science as a source of information about personality.
What was Allport most comfortable in?
Descriptions of humans found in literature and philosophy.
True or False: Allport did ignore scientific information.
False: he did not want to be restricted on purely scientific information, he incorporated science into a few of his beliefs.
How did Allport begin reviewing the history of the word personality?
Its ties to the Latin word “persona” which means mask.
What is Allport’s famous definition of personality?
“Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustments to his environment.”
True or False: Allport changed the phase “unique adjustments to his environment.”
True: He changed it to “characteristic behaviour and thought.
What transpires out of personality?
Personality is never something that is; rather it is something that is becoming.
Becoming.
According to Allport, personality is never static; rather, it is always becoming something else.
Does similarly exist within people?
Yes: people maintain their identity from one experience to another in a sense, they never are quite the same people they were before a particular experience.
What Idea did Allort borrow from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus?
Heraclitus said, “Nothing is, everything is becoming.” and “No man can step into the same river twice.”
Allport said it was the same with personality; it has organization and continuity within the person, but it is constantly changing or becoming something different.
Psychophysical systems.
Reminds us that personality is neither exclusively mental nor exclusively biological.
The organization entails the operation of both body and mind, inextricably fused into a personal unit.
Determine.
Personality is not an abstraction or a convenient fiction; it actually exists: “Personality is something and does something it is what lies behind specific acts and within the individual.”
How is a person’s behaviour generated?
By the personality structure.
Why did Allport change the phrase to “Characterizing behaviour and thought?”
His revised definition covered all behaviour and thought whether or not they were related to adaptation to the environment.
True or False: One’s dream is just as important as satisfying the hunger drive.
True.
What does Allport’s definition of personality stress?
The importance of individuality.
What did Allport always repeat throughout his studies?
That no two humans are the same. The only way to learn about a particular person is to study that particular person.
Character.
Description of a person that includes a value judgment. A person’s character can be “good” or “bad” whereas a personality cannot be.
Temperament.
One of the raw materials from which personality is shaped. Temperament is the emotional component of the personality.
Raw Materials of Personality.
Temperament, intelligence, and physique.
Type.
Category into which one person can be placed by another person. To label a person as an “aggressive type” is to place him or her in a descriptive category based on behaviour.
(1) Views Personality as Contained Within The Person.
A good theory personality should possess.
Theories that explain personality in terms of the various roles people play or in terms of behaviour patterns elicited by environmental circumstances are inadequate.
How should personality be explained during the “Views Personality as Contained Within The Person” stage.
In terms of internal mechanisms rather than external mechanisms.
(2) Views Person as Filled With Variables That Contribute to His or Her Actions.
A good theory personality should possess.
Shows Allport’s disdain of those behaviourists who assumed, for methodological reasons, that the human organism was empty.
What is the proper way to study human behaviour during the “Views Person as Filled With Variables That Contribute to His or Her Actions” stage.
Make a “functional analysis” of stimulating conditions (S) and responses to those conditions (R).
What should any theory of personality pretend during the “Views Person as Filled With Variables That Contribute to His or Her Actions” stage.
Theories of personality pretending adequacy must be dynamic and to be dynamic, must assume a well-shocked organism.
(3) Seeks Motives For behaviour in Present Instead of Past.
A good theory personality should possess.
Allport expressed his dissatisfaction with psychoanalytic theory that traces adult motives in childhood experiences.
Erikson’s belief on the “Seeks Motives For Behaviour in Present Instead of Past” stage.
“People are busy leading their lives into the future, whereas psychology, is busy tracing them into the past.”
Who are prisoners of their past?
Neurotics.
How do you deal with prisoners of their past?
Psychoanalytic methods may be useful in dealing with them, but the motives for healthy, mature adults are found in the present.
(4) Employs Units of Measure Capable of “Living Synthesis.”
A good theory personality should possess.
The integrity of the total personality must never be lost. People are more than a collection of test scores or conditioned reflexes. Whatever units of measure are used to describe a person, must be capable of describing the whole dynamic personality.
(5) Adequately Accounts for Self-Awareness.
A good theory personality should possess.
Humans are the only animals possessing self-awareness.
What would an adequate theory of personality employ?
Units of measure capable of “living synthesis.”
Unit = Trait.
What were traits for Allport?
Biophysical structures.
Trait
Mental structure that initiates and guides reactions and thus accounts for the consistency in one’s behaviour.
What does a trait cause a person to do?
To respond to similar environmental situations in a similar way. Traits develop through a combination of innate needs and learning.
What is Allport’s example of gregariousness?
When a young child finds that his mother is nearly always present to satisfy his wants, the child develops an early affective attachment (conditioning).
The child then finds other social contacts to be conduct to their happiness and successful adjustment such as payments or family gatherings.
The child gradually comes to seek people, rather than to avoid them.
The trait of gregariousness develops.
True or False: A person possessing a strong trait of friendliness will react differently to a stranger than a person possessing a strong trait of suspiciousness.
True: The stimulus is the same but reactions are different because different traits are involved.
True or False: Traits guide peoples behaviours.
True: people can respond to the world only in terms of their traits.
What do traits do?
Traits initiate and guide behaviour.
Can traits be observed directly?
No, their existence must be inferred.
What did Allport posit?
If the person demonstrates a characteristic with regular frequency, in a variety of situations, and with certain amount of intensity, then it is a consistent personality trait.
What does Allport’s theory predict?
Considerable cross-situational consistency in a person’s behaviour.
The type of consistency displayed is assumed to be determined by the traits of a person possesses.
Interaction of Traits and Situations
A person’s trait create a possible range of responses to a given situation but it is the nature of the situation itself that determines which of the potential behaviours actually occur.
Interaction of Traits and Situations example.
If a person has the trait of anxiety, they would have a range of anxiety, but it is unlikely that they would never be anxious.
This underlying trait of anxiety will generate a range of behaviour that they may exhibit in any situation.
What did Allport believe through Traits and Situations?
Different situations can arouse trait-related behaviours to varying degrees.
What did Allports belief through Traits and Situations concluded.
Allport was an early interactionist, instead of a pure trait theorist.
An interactionist is who believes that behaviour always results from the combined influence of person variables (traits) and situation variables.
Habit.
Specific mode of responding—for example, putting on clean clothing in the morning that develops because a more general trait exists (trait of cleanliness).
True or False: A trait synthesizes a number of specific habits.
True.
Attitude.
Attitudes, like habits, are more specific than traits.
One can, for example, have a favourable attitude toward boxing, but this may be only a single manifestation of the more general trait of aggressiveness.
How does a person have an attitude toward something?
They can have it toward a certain person, a maker of automobile, or travel.
How is a trait, conversely, more general?
For example, if a person is basically aggressive, he or she will tend to act aggressively toward strangers, acquaintances, animals, world affairs, and the like.
Distinction between attitudes and traits.
Attitudes usually imply evaluation. Attitudes are usually for, or against something; they are either positive or negative and they imply either acceptance or rejection of something.
Traits, are responsible for all behaviour and cognitions whether or not evaluation is involved.
Individual Traits.
Either the unique patterns of traits possessed by an individual or the unique way that a particular trait manifests itself in the personality of a particular person.
For example, a particular person’s way of displaying aggressiveness. Later in the development of his theory, Allport changed the term individual trait to personal disposition.
Common traits.
Traits are used to describe a group of individuals.
