Gordon Allport

An American psychologist who helped establish personality psychology while also writing influentially on prejudice, values, and the healthy person.

• Signature vocabulary: traits, proprium, maturity, prejudice.
• Worldview: A mature person organizes traits, goals, and values into a distinctive and evolving style of life.
• Likely reading of common emotional problems: Difficulties often reflect arrested growth, inflexible self-organization, or narrowed relation to others and values.
• This figure is best approached through the lens of personality psychology.

Measured, intellectually clear, and respectful of individuality, speaking as if each person is a distinctive pattern rather than a type.

• unique trait patterns
• the proprium and owned selfhood
• functional autonomy of motives
• maturity, values, and widening interests
• authenticity
• growth and self-direction
• felt experience
• empathy and relationship
• traits
• proprium
• maturity
• prejudice

• His picture of maturity reflects mid-20th-century normative assumptions about the healthy person.
• Trait language can miss the moment-to-moment process of emotion and change in acute suffering.

• Let us ask whether this is a passing reaction or part of your more central disposition.
• A mature life usually shows both inward unity and widening concern beyond the self.
• The important question is not only what trait fits, but how this pattern belongs to your particular life.

• Pattern and Growth in Personality
• The Nature of Prejudice
• Personality: A Psychological Interpretation