Allport’s Theory Of Personality Traits

Gordon Allport (1897 – 1967) was a respected and influential American scholar who worked in the field of psychology. Allport, the son of a doctor father and a teacher mother, was the youngest of four brothers. This translated into a keen interest in understanding human motivation, drives, and personality, which led him to develop personality trait theory.

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

After that experience, Allport returned to Harvard to earn his doctorate in psychology. During his career, which takes place in the first half of the century. XX,  made important contributions to  psychology.  Among the most outstanding we can mention the development of his ideas about personal traits, which he 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 was that personality traits could be formed by forces past and present. Allport believed that personality was made up of three types of traits: cardinal, central, and secondary.

Allport meets Freud

Allport chronicled the story of his visit to Freud  in his autobiographical essay “ Pattern and Growth of Personality” . To break the ice on meeting Freud, Allport said he had met a boy while on the train journey to Vienna. The boy did not want to sit next to a passenger who was dirty, despite his mother’s reassuring words. Allport suggested that perhaps the boy had this phobia because of his mother, a very clean and apparently quite dominant woman. After watching Allport for a few minutes, Freud asked,  “Was that boy by any chance you?”

Allport saw Freud’s intention to reduce this small portion of observed interaction to an unconscious episode from his own childhood . This served to remind him that psychoanalysis tends to delve into both the past and the unconscious, passing in this process over the supposedly most important, conscious and immediate aspects of experience.

Although Allport never denied that unconscious and historical variables could play a relevant role in motivating certain behaviors,  his work would always emphasize conscious motivations related to the current context.

Allport Personality Traits Theory

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

Cardinal features

Among some historical figures who have demonstrated a strong cardinal streak are Abraham Lincoln for his honesty, the Marquis de Sade for his sadism and Joan of Arc for her act of heroism. People with such personalities can become so known for these traits that their names are often associated with these qualities. Allport suggested that cardinal traits are rare and tend to develop over the years. 

When they are present, the cardinal traits shape the person in their sense of themselves, their emotional makeup, their attitudes, and their behavior. This is so clear that we can even identify them historically by them, as in the case of the Marquis de Sade.

central features

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

According to Allport’s Personality Traits Theory,  each person has between 5 and 10 core traits, which are present to varying degrees in each.  They include common traits, intelligence, shyness, honesty, and would be major conditioning factors in most of our behaviors.

secondary traits

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

For example, an individual whose cardinal trait is assertiveness may show signs of submission when the police detain him for speeding. This is just a situational trait that may or may not appear in other interpersonal encounters.

According to Allport,  these secondary traits are quite difficult to detect because they are stimulated by a smaller scale of equivalent stimuli .

Allport Research on Personality Traits

Allport’s theory of personality traits is not directly based on experimental investigation, and that is his biggest Achilles heel.  In fact, he published little research to support his theory. However, in his first publication, together with his brother, social psychologist Floyd Allport, he examined 55 male college students based on their core characteristics. Upon investigation, they concluded that the traits were measurable in most students. The main objective of this research was to develop a scale as a way to “measure” personality.

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 couple friends were acquired by Allport and analyzed. Then, in an exercise, he asked 36 people to characterize Jenny in terms of the traits they would be able to identify in these cards.

For his study,  Allport concluded that  traits do not exist independently. Furthermore, at any given time, the behaviors that motivate two certain traits can come into conflict, so that, through the hierarchy, one will prevail over the other.

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

However,  Allport’s research and his theory of personality traits are considered pioneering works in the field of personality.  He relied on objective, statistical data rather than personal experience. It also received certain criticisms, such as the fact that it would not address the individual’s state or how he might behave in a temporary way.