Thanks to him, we understood what personality is like: who is Gordon Allport?

Gordon Willard Allport, one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century, was born on November 11, 1897, in Montezuma, Indiana, USA, as the youngest of four sons of John Edwards and Nellie Edith Allport.

As his father was a town doctor, Allport became interested in the medical profession as a child. They help their fathers like a clinical assistant with their siblings. “Looking at the office, washing bottles, and taking care of patients were important aspects of my early education,” Allport says. Later, this experience became an integral part of his childhood, and he spent a hardworking but shy childhood. His mother, a former teacher, attaches great importance to the religious and intellectual development of her children. Allport saw his mother as a true trainer for him, who instilled in him the importance of education and work ethic.

Gordon Willard Allport (November 11, 1897 – October 9, 1967) was an American psychologist. Allport was one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personality psychology.

After graduating from high school in 1915, Allport is accepted as a scholarship student to Harvard University, where his older brother Floyd Allport also studied. However, in the same year, he interrupted his education due to his military duty in the First World War. Despite this, Allport received a bachelor's degree in philosophy and economics in 1919. After his graduation, he went to Istanbul and taught English and sociology at Robert College for a year.

Influenced by his older brother Floyd Allport, who is seen as the father of Experimental Social Psychology, and Hugo Munsterberg, who studies experimental psychology, Allport returns to Harvard University on a scholarship for his psychology doctorate. In 1921, his first book, Personality Traits: Their Classification and Measurement, co-written with Floyd Alport, was published. Allport, who completed his doctorate in psychology at Harvard University in 1922, felt that the field of social psychology where his older brother Floyd Allport worked was far from him, and preferred to deal with personality psychology, which was not as fashionable as social psychology in those days.

Gordon Allport's doctoral thesis, An Experimental Study of the Traits of Personality, was the first study on personality traits in the United States. After his doctorate, Allport was awarded the Sheldon Travel Scholarship in 1922. He spent the first year of his scholarship, which he described as his second intellectual beginning, at the Gestalt School in Berlin and Hamburg, and the second year with psychology studies at Cambridge University in England. While in Germany, he had the opportunity to work on the views of important psychologists such as Wilhelm Windelband, William Stern, and Eduard Spranger.

During these years, Allport traveled from Germany to Vienna and had a meeting with Freud. In this meeting, which took place at Freud's house, an incident that Allport shared with Freud is among the most well-known anecdotes in the history of psychology. Allport asks Freud to explain the connection between the behavior of the mother, who has a neat and dominant personality, and the child's dirt phobia, giving the example of a four-year-old boy traveling with his mother on the tram, not wanting to sit next to a dirty man. “Was that little boy you?” Freud asked Allport. he asks. Allport sees this as an attempt by Freud to open a path of observation to the analysis of his own childhood unconscious memory and sees it as a reminder to himself that psychoanalysis tends to dig deep and reveal.

With his appointment as a Social Sciences lecturer at Harvard in 1924, he began to give lectures and seminars on subjects such as personality psychology and the psychological and social effects of personality. His lectures under the title of Psychological and Social Aspects are among the first theories on personality psychology.

Gordon Allport married Ada Lufkin Gould, a psychologist like him, in 1925. Their only child, Robert, who became a pediatrician when he grew up, was born. He teaches for four years at Dartmouth University in New Hampshire. Returning to Harvard, where he remained until the end of his academic career, Allport received the titles of associate professor in 1937 and professor in 1942.

In addition to his academic studies, he also serves as the chairman of many scientific committees and associations. During the Second World War, he becomes chairman of the Psychology Committee, which deals with European refugee scientists. He is also elected president of the American Psychological Association and the Social Issues Psychological Research Association. He is deemed worthy of many awards for his work in the field of psychology, such as the gold medal given by the American Psychological Foundation in 1963 and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award given by the American Psychological Association in 1964.

Gordon Allport is one of the leading personality theorists of the twentieth century. His works are seen as a synthesis of individual personality traits and William James's traditional understanding of psychology. Although Allport is American, we can say that the fact that he studied psychology in Europe has caused him to carry the traces of both American and European psychologists in his thoughts. However, he looks like a synthesizer, not an imitator.

Above all, believing that the individual is unique and unique, Allport, as a humanistic psychologist, opposed the behavioral and psychoanalytic theories of psychology. Allport, who rejects psychoanalysis and opposes behaviorism, which only focuses on the study of observable behaviors, puts forward his own unique theory of personality instead. Allport argues that each individual has hundreds of traits, which are generally found in three levels. Allport, however, is a personality trait theorist who believes that a few particular traits dominate each individual's own personality.

Allport's interest in religion begins with his 1937 book Personality: A Psychological Interpretation. He states there that religion is an important part of personality. Allport gives several speeches to emphasize the idea that religion, which is an indispensable component of personality, should not be neglected and that religion cannot be ignored in psychology and personality studies. These conversations make up his famous work The Individual and His Religion.

In his influential 1954 work, The Nature of Prejudice, Allport points out that prejudice is the tendency to blend as much as possible, including all that has similar intellectual and emotional flavor.

In The Nature of Prejudice, he used both cognitive and psychological approaches. The study shows the bias in categorizing large groups in a society resulting from faulty generalization. Allport states that a stereotype is an exaggerated belief associated with a category. Thus, stereotypes contain elements that are fundamentally wrong and, unsurprisingly, contradictory to themselves.

Allport's last book, Letters from Jenny, was published in 1965. This book consists of 300 separate letters that he received over twelve years from a woman who was 58 years old in her first correspondence. Retiring in 1964, Allport died of lung cancer on October 9, 1967.