Gordon Allport grew up in a home that doubled as his father's hospital
Patients, nurses and medical equipment filled the Allport household in Ohio, and the boys washed bottles and tended the office. Gordon Allport later became a founding figure of personality psychology, taught Stanley Milgram and Jerome Bruner, and argued that each person must be understood as unique, here and now.
Allport was born on 11 November 1897 in Montezuma, Indiana, the youngest of four sons in a religious family with missionary roots. After many moves, the family settled in Ohio, and he went to public schools in Cleveland. His mother, a former teacher, pressed hard for learning and faith. His father, a country doctor, ran a clinic from the house; he also drew the ire of the journalist Samuel Hopkins Adams, whose exposé of fake cures branded him a quack for mailing a supposed addiction remedy that turned out to contain more morphine.
A reserved, studious boy, Gordon ran a small printing business as a teenager and edited his school paper, graduating second in his class in 1915 and winning a scholarship to Harvard, where his brother Floyd was working on a psychology doctorate. He took his first degree in philosophy and economics in 1919, not psychology. He then taught at Robert College in Istanbul and, while in Europe, visited Sigmund Freud in Vienna, before returning to Harvard, co-writing a 1921 paper on classifying and measuring personality traits with Floyd, and completing his doctorate in 1922.
His psychology steered between the two dominant schools. He found psychoanalysis too eager to read hidden meanings into people and behaviourism too shallow in what it drew from its data. Instead he built an eclectic theory of traits, stressed the uniqueness of every individual, and gave more weight to a person's present situation than to their past. He also helped develop scales for measuring values.
His reach came from choosing big subjects, including rumour, prejudice, religion and traits, and from the mark he left on students during a long Harvard career. Among them were Stanley Milgram, Jerome Bruner, Anthony Greenwald and Thomas Pettigrew. A 2002 survey ranked him the 11th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He died on 9 October 1967.
Source: Gordon Allport
