How social was personality? The Allports' "connection" of social and personality psychology

This paper investigates three conflicting reconstructions of the historical relationship between personality and social psychology and addresses questions they raise regarding the subdisciplinary status of personality in the 1920s and the way in which the field gradually emerged as a separate area of psychology. Contesting claims that Floyd Allport first connected social psychology to a separate "branch" of personality psychology in the 1920s, I argue that he drew upon earlier work of psychologists and sociologists who treated personality as a central topic of social psychology. I compare Floyd Allport's views with those of Gordon Allport, who endeavored to establish personality as a separate subdiscipline.     

"A coherent datum of perception": Gordon Allport, Floyd Allport, and the politics of "personality"

This paper examines Floyd and Gordon Allport's early work on "personality" psychology. In the early 1920s, personality was an unorthodox topic, and for the Allports it initially served as an intellectual and personal bond. Floyd proposed the subject to his brother as a dissertation topic, and the two worked closely on developing personality tests. By 1924, however, "personality" had become the site of a dispute between the two brothers over the intellectual and methodological character of American psychology. The present study examines the origins of this dispute, while gauging the personal and professional ramifications of the dispute. On a larger level, this essay explores the role and meaning of "personality" in the academic culture of 1920s America.     

Individualism and the social in early American social psychology

In this paper an attempt is made to specify the original conception of the social dimensions of cognition, emotion and behavior-and of a distinctively social psychology-that was held by early American social psychologists, but abandoned by later generations of social psychologists committed to Floyd Allport's individualistic experimental program. Two influential forms of "individualism" in the work of Floyd Allport are distinguished and detailed.     

A critical gaze and wistful glance at Handbook histories of social psychology: did the successive accounts by Gordon Allport and successors historiographically succeed?

Gordon Allport's account of the development of social psychology in the 1954 Handbook of Social Psychology became, de facto, a standard or official historical reference for researchers and apprentices. His history also provided the field's ontological center point with a definition of social psychology that would become predominant. The revised and updated chapter appeared posthumously in 1968, was then reprinted (lightly edited) in 1985, but was removed from the 1998 Handbook. In 1966, Allport prepared a parallel evaluation of six decades of the history of social psychology, for a conference on graduate education in social psychology. This paper was critical of "elaborate mendacious experimentation" and ended with a plea for an interdisciplinary cross-cultivation. It was rarely cited. Ironically, it was Allport's "official" history, his justificatory Handbook account, that often was used for graduate mentoring rather than the more critical history, specifically written to address issues of graduate education. Other "official" Handbook historical chapters that succeeded Allport's displayed less breadth of geographical and transdisciplinary coverage and offered a shorter temporal, more presentist, and more selective personalist historical perspective. In contrast to more contextualist accounts, these Handbook chapters are constrained in a number of ways that raise questions about the success, functions, and professional consequences of such "official" histories, and who should write them.     

Contextualizing Floyd Allports's Social Psychology

This paper looks at the program for social psychology presented by Floyd Allport in his Social Psychology of 1924. It contextualizes Allport's program in terms of intellectual currents of the time and the views of his teachers at Harvard University, specifically the philosopher Ralph Barton Perry and the psychologists Edwin B. Holt and Hugo Münsterberg. Finally, the paper analyzes responses to Allport's program at the time and later, retrospective responses.     

The concept of personality in 19th-century French and 20th-century American psychology

Since the 1920s, the road to the acknowledgement of personality psychology as a field of scientific psychology that has individuality as its object began with the founding of the discipline by Gordon W. Allport. Historians of psychology have made serious attempts to reconstruct the cultural, political, institutional, and chronological beginnings of this field in America in the 20th century. In this literature, however, an important European tradition of psychological studies of personality that developed in France in the 2nd half of the 19th century has been overlooked. The aim of this article is to cast some light on this unexplored tradition of psychological personality studies and to discuss its influence on the development of the scientific study of personality in the United States.     

The nature of The Nature of Prejudice

This paper attempts to establish the historical context for the development and publication of Gordon Allport's text, The Nature of Prejudice, and by so doing illustrate the importance of historicizing psychological social psychology. The Nature of Prejudice was, in part, the cumulative result of a decade of Gordon Allport's classroom teaching in a new interdisciplinary unit at Harvard, the Department of Social Relations. This paper chronicles key elements of Allport's course -"Prejudice and Intergroup Conflict"-from 1944 to the mid-1950s.     

Longitudinal studies of personality disorders: four lessons from personality psychology

The three longitudinal projects described in this special section of the Journal of Personality Disorders raise a number of intriguing questions concerning the natural history of personality disorders and offer more than their share of surprises. In addition, they underscore several valuable lessons derived from the literature on normal-range personality traits. Drawing in part from the writings of the American trait psychologist Gordon Allport, I describe four such lessons: (1) change and continuity of personality traits and disorders can and do coexist, (2) the covariation among personality traits helps to account for the "comorbidity" among personality disorders, (3) personality traits and disorders influence how individuals interpret life events, and (4) personality traits must be distinguished from behavioral adaptations to these traits. These lessons remind us that the science of personality disorders must be informed by the basic science of personality.     

On knowing the meaning of words we are unable to report confirmation of a guessing explanation

This experiment investigated Allport's (1977) claim that normal subjects can be induced to make semantic errors of the type characterised by “deep dyslexia”. The procedure followed that used by Allport except that a subject based control for the chance level of semantic errors was included. The results replicated the original finding by producing a semantic error rate of 12·7%. It was shown, however, that this rate was not significantly higher than the calculated chance rate of 11·5%. It was concluded, therefore, that the semantic error rates reported by Allport can be accounted for in terms of a guessing artefact and thus they bear no relevance to the problem of deep dyslexia.     

威廉·斯特恩的儿童人格发展观及其历史效应

威廉·斯特恩是被历史遮蔽的现代儿童发展心理学的重要创建者,对儿童人格发展理论作出了原创性卓越贡献。他以批判人格主义为哲学基础提出了人文科学取向的儿童人格发展观,主要表现在整体论、过程论和情境论三个维面。他认为儿童人格发展是多元统一的整合性发展,是主动、动力、辩证、独特和开放的过程性发展,是内在于生活世界的情境性发展。他的观点为奥尔波特和勒温、维果茨基、皮亚杰、彪勒及里格尔等人的儿童发展理论提供了直接或间接思想来源。     

Karen Horney: Theorist in Psychoanalysis and Feminine Psychology

Karen Horney is unique and unparalleled in personality theory. She has the distinction of being the only woman whose theory is detailed in personality textbooks. Horney is known as a neo-Freudian for her revision of Freudian thought; a social psychological theorist for her emphasis on cultural and social influences; a humanist for her holistic view and emphasis on self-realization; and a feminist for her development of a feminine psychology. She was a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and founder and dean of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, a training institute. She was a teacher who could simplify the most difficult concepts; a therapist with deep human involvement; Editor of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis ; a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association; a regular contributor to scientific sessions; and a prolific writer. She was personally and professionally a "well-rounded balance of an abundance of striving and creative possibility."     

On the subjectivity of personality theory.

Every theorist of personality views the human condition from the unique perspective of his own individuality. As a consequence, personality theories are strongly influenced by personal and subjective factors. These influences are partially responsible for the present day lack of consensus in psychology as to basic conceptual frameworks for the study of man. The science of human personality can achieve a greater degree of consensus and generality only if it begins to turn back on itself and question its own psychological foundations. The role of subjective and personal factors in this field can be studied and made more explicit by means of a psychobiographical method which interprets the major ideas of personality theories in the light of the formative experiences in the respective theorists' lives. This method is briefly illustrated by an examination of the influence of personal experiences on theoretical concepts in the work of Carl Jung, Carl Rogers, Wilhelm Reich, and Gordon Allport. The subjective factors disclosed by psychobiographical analysis can bee seen to interact with influences stemming from the intellectual and historical context within which the theorist work. The psychobiographical study of personality theory is only one part of a larger discipline, the psychology of knowledge, which would study the role of subjective and personal factors in the structure of man's knowledge in general.     

Making social psychology experimental: a conceptual history, 1920-1970

The historical emergence of a field devoted to the experimental investigation of effects identified as "social" required a radical break with traditional conceptions of the social. Psychological experimentation was limited to the investigation of effects that were proximal, local, short-term, and decomposable. A viable accommodation to these constraints occurred in the closely related programs of Moede's experimental crowd psychology and Floyd Allport's experimental social psychology. Later, Kurt Lewin attempted to provide a different conceptual foundation for the field by drawing on certain precepts of Gestalt psychology and the philosophy of scientific experimentation developed by Ernst Cassirer. These ideas were poorly understood and were soon replaced by a methodological regime in which a new generation of statistical procedures and experimental design shaped implicit conceptions of the social in social psychological experiments through such procedures as randomization and the additive combination of variables.     

Historical Interpretation of Augustine: The Promise of James,Allport, and Capps

Capps' interpretation of Augustine is methodologically a contribution to historiography. Capps draws on the concepts/labels of James and Allport to explain Augustine's unique personality structure. In the end, he moves beyond the James and Allport concepts/labels to their historical strategies. Such work complements traditional narrative explanation.     

奥尔波特人本主义心理学评价探新

奥尔波特是人本主义心理学的建立者之一 ,也是健康人格心理学的奠基者。其贡献 :( 1)参与创建人本主义心理学 ;( 2 )开创美国人格心理学 ;( 3)奠基人本主义自我论。其局限 :( 1)缺乏完整体系与确证 ;( 2 )忽视人格的社会根源 ;( 3)有些论述过于极端化     

Commentary on the Special Issue: Religion in the Psychology of Personality

The author comments on the special issue on religion in the psychology of personality. She focuses her discussion on the following topics: the historical tripartite theory of cognition-affection-conation; ways that family psychology and theories of language clarify the "problem" of adherence to "false realities"; the multidimensionality of personality and religion and their cultural embeddedness as illuminated in clinical assessment by way of contextual family theory (Boszormenyi-Nagy & Krasner, 1986) and the Kantor and Lehr (1975) systems theory; the role of the investigator's personality in theory and research about personality and religion; the one-sided emphasis on the empirical tradition in the psychology of religion; and the omission of the personalist tradition.     

文化与人格研究中的几个问题

“文化与人格”包含着“文化中的人格”和“人格中的文化”两个命题。当今人格与文化研究中存在几个问题:人格特质的跨文化普遍性问题;人格与文化研究中的文化问题;人格与文化的作用机制问题。要解决这些问题:1.将主位研究与客位研究结合起来;2.将文化看作动态的过程;3.考虑到文化与人格之间起作用的中间机制;4.加强人格心理学与其它学科的联系。     

Whig and anti-whig histories- and other curiosities of social psychology

In successive editions of the Handbook of Social Psychology (Lindzey, 1954), the focus of the history of the field shifted from the substantive ideas of nineteenth-century thinkers to the successful emergence of a psychological experimental social psychology in the twentieth. Countering this whiggish account, the dominant themes in the present issue involve attempts to portray two parallel paradigm shifts: from a "social" to an "asocial" social psychology, and from a broad-ranging theoretical-philosophical subject to a narrow experimental (psychological) science-changes initiated by Floyd Allport. But such a formulation may be called into question as another version of retrospective history-with inverted, anti-Whig valuations.     

Intrinsic-Extrinsic Religiosity and University Students' Willingness to Donate Organs Posthumously

This research focuses on the links between intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientations as they relate to willingness to donate organs posthumously. Participants responded to a factual test of their knowledge about organ donation, indicated their degree of willingness to donate organs, and filled out personality inventories measuring their intrinsic and extrinsic orientations. The data indicated a high level of factual knowledge about organ donation. Also, contrary to Allport's (1966) arguments, people with an intrinsic religious orientation were not more likely to donate their organs, nor were people with an extrinsic religious orientation less likely to do so. Instead, it was found that intrinsic religiosity was unrelated to willingness to donate organs and that extrinsics with strong social orientations were more willing to donate their organs. Discussion centers on the need to develop more psy-chometrically sound measures of mature religiosity as a means of conducting a fairer test of Allport's original theorizing about intrinsic religiosity.     

Person,symbol, sociality: Towards a social psychology of cultural dynamics

Contemporary research on personality and culture has successfully mapped out major cultural differences in personality profile. However, in order to investigate the dynamic process by which culturally shaped personalities are formed, maintained, and transformed, sociality or the totality of social processes that mediate the culture–personality relationship need to be examined. A research program of a social psychology of cultural dynamics is outlined, and a computer simulation is described as an example of this metatheoretical orientation. This connectionist-based simulation suggests that there exists a physically realizable system that can generate both individual differences and culture from a stream of social interaction episodes among multiple actors. The importance of sociality in personality and culture research is emphasized.