Allport’s Theory Of Personality Traits

Gordon Allport (1897 – 1967) was a highly respected and influential American scholar in the field of psychology. Allport came from a hardworking family that valued health and education. This resulted in a great interest in understanding human motivation, drives, and personality.

After earning his undergraduate degree from Harvard, Allport took a trip to Vienna, Austria, where he met Sigmund Freud, which would end up shaping his career and his contributions to American psychology.

After that experience, Allport returned to Harvard to obtain his doctorate in psychology. Throughout this career, which spanned the first half of the 20th century, he made important contributions to psychology, including the development of his ideas about personal traits, which he later called personal dispositions.

According to Allport, these traits are influenced by our childhood experiences, our current environment, and the interaction between the two. In Allport’s time, the idea that personality traits could be shaped by past and present forces. Allport believed that personality was made up of three types of traits: cardinal, central, and secondary.

Allport meets Freud

Allport told the story of his visit to Freud in his autobiographical essay  Pattern and Growth in Personality . To break the ice when he met Freud, Allport recounted how he had met a boy on the train on his way to Vienna who was afraid of getting dirty. The boy refused to sit near someone dirty, despite his mother’s reassuring words. Allport suggested that perhaps the boy had learned this phobia from his mother, a very clean and apparently quite domineering woman. After studying Allport for a minute, Freud asked, “And that little boy was you?”

Allport experienced Freud’s attempt to reduce this small portion of observed interaction to an unconscious episode from his own childhood. And it served as a reminder to him that psychoanalysis tends to delve into both the past and the unconscious, overlooking in the process the most important, conscious, and immediate supposed aspects of experience.

Despite the fact that Allport never denied that unconscious and historical variables could play a relevant role as motivators of certain behaviors,  his work would always emphasize conscious motivations and those related to the current context.

Allport’s theory of personality traits

In 1936, the psychologist Gordon Allport discovered that a single English dictionary contained more than 4,000 words that described different personality traits.  Allport’s theory of personality traits categorized these into three levels.

Cardinal traits

Some historical figures who would have shown to have a strong cardinal trait would have been Abraham Lincoln for his honesty, Marquis de Sade for sadism and Joan of Arc for his heroic self-service. People with such personalities can become so well known for these traits that their names are often closely associated with these qualities. Allport suggested that cardinal features are rare and tend to develop over the years. 

When present, cardinal features shape the person, their sense of themselves, their emotional makeup, their attitudes, and their behavior. This is so so, that we can get to identify them historically by them.

Central features

Core traits are the general characteristics that form the basic foundations of personality. These core features, although not as dominant as the cardinal features, would be the main features that can be used to describe another person. We are talking about present and important traits, but not absolutely dominant.

According to Allport’s theory of personality traits, each person has between 5 and 10 core traits, and they are present to varying degrees in each person. These include common traits. such as intelligent, shy, honest and would be the main determinants in most of our behaviors.

Secondary traits

Secondary traits are traits that are sometimes related to attitudes or preferences, that is, dispositions that are significantly less generalized and less relevant. They often appear only in certain situations or under specific circumstances.

For example, a person whose cardinal trait is assertiveness may show signs of submission when stopped by the police for speeding. This is just a situational trait that may or may not show up for other interpersonal encounters.

According to Allport, these secondary traits are difficult to detect because they are stimulated by a narrower range of equivalent stimuli and emit a narrower range of equivalent responses.

Allport Research on Personality Traits

Allport’s theory of personality traits is not based directly on empirical research, and this is his greatest Achilles heel. In fact, he published very little research to support his theory. However, in his first post, he and his brother, the social psychologist Floyd Allport, examined 55 male college students based on their core traits. After research, they concluded that the traits were measurable in most individuals. The main objective of this test was to develop a personality measurement scale.

Another curious initiative by Gordon Allport was to analyze a series of letters from a woman named Jenny Gove Masterson. The 301 letters that Jenny wrote during the last eleven years of her life to a married couple were acquired by Allport and analyzed. Thirty-six people were asked to characterize Jenny based on the traits they were able to identify.

For his study, Allport concluded that traits do not exist independently. In addition, at a given moment the behaviors that motivate two certain traits may come into conflict, so that in a hierarchy one will prevail over the other.

While several theorists agree that people can be described by their personality traits, there is still a debate about the number of basic traits that make up the human personality. For example, Raymond Cattell reduced the number of observable features from 4,000 to 171 and later to 16, combining certain features and eliminating the most unique or difficult-to-define features. In contrast, the British psychologist Hans Eysenck developed a personality model based on just three.

However, Allport’s research along with his theory of personality traits is considered pioneering works in the field of personality. He relied on statistical or objective data, rather than personal experience. There are also certain criticisms of Allport’s theory of personality traits, such as, for example, that it does not address the state of a person or the way in which they can behave temporarily.