# Gordon Allport **Gordon W. Allport** (November 11, 1897 – October 9, 1967) was the Harvard psychologist who founded the modern study of prejudice and, separately, the trait theory of personality. He spent his career (1930–67) at Harvard, helped found its Sociology department (1931) and its interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations in the late 1940s, edited the *Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology*, and was APA president in 1939. His students included [[Stanley Milgram]], Jerome Bruner, Thomas Pettigrew, Leo Postman and Anthony Greenwald — a lineage that runs from obedience experiments to the implicit-association test. Eleven of the vault's Subjects pages link here because the questions he set are still the ones the field asks. ## The Nature of Prejudice (1954) The book grew out of his work with refugees during the war and his wartime rumor research with Postman (*The Psychology of Rumor*, 1947). Its argument, condensed on [[The Nature of Prejudice]]: prejudice is not an aberration but a by-product of the mind's normal habit of **categorization** — we cannot think without categories, and categories about people harden into [[Stereotyping]] and then into hostility. The book organizes the field's later vocabulary: in-groups and out-groups, [[Scapegoating]] as displaced aggression, the **[[Contact Hypothesis]]** — intergroup contact reduces prejudice when four conditions hold (equal status, common goals, cooperation, institutional support) — and **Allport's Scale**, five escalating stages from antilocution through avoidance and discrimination to physical attack and extermination. The scale is the vault's oldest formal model of how rhetoric becomes violence; the [[Dehumanization]] and [[Ethnocentrism]] pages sit on its upper rungs. ## Personality Allport rejected both Freud and behaviorism in favor of an eclectic trait psychology: 4,500 trait words culled from the dictionary; cardinal, central and secondary traits; and an insistence on the uniqueness of the individual ("idiographic" against "nomothetic" study). The [[F-Scale]] and *[[The Authoritarian Personality]]* were a rival, Freudian-derived approach to the same wartime problem — why do people follow — and the vault reads the two traditions against each other. ## Why the vault cares Allport is the origin of the *contact* tradition that [[Muzafer Sherif]]'s [[Realistic Conflict Theory]] (Robbers Cave) and [[Henri Tajfel]]'s [[Social Identity Theory]] and [[Minimal Group Paradigm]] then complicated: Sherif showed that conflict over real resources produces prejudice fast and that superordinate goals dissolve it; Tajfel showed that even *no* conflict — an arbitrary label — is enough for in-group favoritism. [[Social Dominance Theory]] and [[Crowd Psychology]] are the later branches. For a knowledge base about how a political movement manufactures out-groups, Allport's claim that the raw material is ordinary cognition, not pathology, is the foundational — and least comfortable — finding. ## See Also - [[The Nature of Prejudice]] · [[Contact Hypothesis]] · [[Scapegoating]] · [[Prejudice]] · [[Stereotyping]] - [[Stanley Milgram]] · [[Muzafer Sherif]] · [[Henri Tajfel]] · [[Realistic Conflict Theory]] · [[Social Identity Theory]] - [[F-Scale]] · [[The Authoritarian Personality]] · [[Dehumanization]] · [[Psychology Hub]]