Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [203]
The results were disconcerting. Not only was there little relation between what the children said on the paper-and-pencil tests and how they actually behaved, but remarkably little consistency between how honest or dishonest any child was in one situation and how honest or dishonest in a different one. Hartshorne and May concluded that if traits existed, they did not cause individuals to behave similarly in different situations.
[We] are quite ready to recognize the existence of some common factors which tend to make individuals differ from one another…Our contention, however, is that this common factor is not an inner entity operating independently of the situations in which the individual is placed but is a function of the situation.9
This contradicted everyday experience. We all feel that some of the people we know are honest and others dishonest, some reserved and others outgoing, some painstaking and others slapdash. Gordon Allport (1897–1967), a leading light of the psychology department at Harvard, came to the rescue with a series of studies and a book, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (1937). Allport, a mild-mannered, hardworking man with plain doughy features, had many research interests, among them prejudice, communication, and values, but personality, and in particular trait theory, was the central concern of his life. It was in part thanks to his own personality that he was the ideal person to counter Hartshorne-May situationism with scientific proof of commonsense dispositionism.10
Allport was the youngest of four sons of a country doctor in Indiana. His father’s family had come from England several generations earlier, his mother was of German and Scottish descent, and Allport home life, he recalled many years later, “was marked by plain Protestant piety and hard work.” There being no hospital facilities in the area, for years the Allport household included patients and nurses, and young Allport did his fair share of tending the office, washing bottles, and caring for patients. He absorbed his father’s humanitarian outlook and values, and in later years liked to quote his father’s favorite dictum: “If every person worked as hard as he could and took only the minimum financial return required by his family’s needs, then there would be just enough wealth to go around.”
At Harvard Allport found time, even with his studies, to do a good deal of volunteer work in social services. This satisfied a deep-seated need to help people with problems and, he said in an autobiographical sketch, “gave me a feeling of competence (to offset a generalized inferiority feeling).” His two interests, psychology and social service, merged when he became convinced that “to do effective social service, one needed a sound conception of human personality.”
For Allport the study of personality was always a commonsense matter; he was interested in the conscious and easily accessible rather than the murky depths of the unconscious. He often told of his only meeting with Freud, an episode that profoundly affected him. As a brash youth of twenty-two, he had written to Freud while visiting Vienna to say that he was in town and would like to meet him. Freud graciously received him but sat in silence, waiting for him to speak. Trying to think of something to say, Allport mentioned that in the tram on the way to Freud’s office he had heard a four-year-old boy talking to his mother about wanting to avoid