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Allport's Theory of Personality

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750 views8 pages

Allport's Theory of Personality

Uploaded by

Khushboo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Gordon Allport was one of the first

modern trait theorists. Gordon


Allport founded the trait theory in
1936. Allport did not discover this
theory based upon other theories.
He discovered or founded this
theory by analyzing or studying
every trait within the english
dictionary.
Introduction
• Allport and Henry Odbert worked through two of the most
comprehensive dictionaries of the English language available and
extracted around 18,000 personality-describing words. From this list
they reduced the number of words to approximately 4,500 personality-
describing adjectives which they considered to describe observable and
relatively permanent personality traits.
• Allport organized these traits into a hierarchy of three levels: Cardinal,
Central and Secondary traits
Hierarchy of traits
Secondary traits

Secondary traits exist at the bottom of the hierarchy and are not quite as obvious
or consistent as central traits. They are plentiful but are only present under
specific circumstances; they include things like preferences and attitudes. These
secondary traits explain why a person may at times exhibit behaviors that seem
incongruent with their usual behaviors. For example, a friendly person gets angry
when people try to tickle him; another is not an anxious person but always feels
nervous speaking publicly.
Central Traits

Central traits come next in the hierarchy. These are general characteristics found
in varying degrees in every person (such as loyalty, kindness, agreeableness,
friendliness, sneakiness, wildness, or grouchiness). They are the basic building
blocks that shape most of our behavior.
Cardinal Traits

Cardinal traits dominate and shape an individual’s behavior, such as Ebenezer


Scrooge’s greed or Mother Theresa’s altruism. They stand at the top of the
hierarchy and are collectively known as the individual’s master control. They are
considered to be an individual’s ruling passions. Cardinal traits are powerful, but
few people have personalities dominated by a single trait. Instead, our
personalities are typically composed of multiple traits.
Critical analysis

• Strengths of Allport's Personality Theory


• Strict reliance on objective and statistical data.
• Has no bias compared to other theories.
• Freud's relationship with his mother and Jun's belief in mythology could have been possible
influences of their theories.
• Describes each and every trait.
• Easy to use and have a number of assessment devices.
• Provides an easy to understand continuum that gives a large amount of information about a
person's personality about the self and the world.
Critical analysis

• Weaknesses of Allport's personality Theory


• Poor predictor of the future.
• Does not address development of the traits.
• This trait theory is stuck explaining about present events rather than looking towards the
past or future.
• Does not provide a way to change bad traits.
• Measures the traits but explains no way how to change them.
• This theory seeks to explain or list what traits people have throughout
the duration of their life.

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