Gordon Allport (1897–1967) was widely recognized as a major contributor to the emerging discipline of psychology in the United States during many of its formative years, in which the scientific status of psychology was widely debated and challenged. Our focus in this brief biographical study will be to employ Allport’s own reflections of himself as a “maverick” (Allport 1967a, p. 9) both in his view of the proper object of study for psychology and of appropriate methods of investigation. His contrarian nature is evident in his refusal to adopt a psychology congruent with the more narrowly defined experimental interests of what was emerging as mainstream American psychology conceived as a natural science.
Life and Career
Gordon Allport was one of four sons born to a country doctor, John Edwards, and to a pious Free Methodist mother, Niettle Wise. He was born in Montezuma, Indiana, but the Allport family soon moved to Glennville, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. While Gordon was the youngest...
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Hood, R. (2020). Allport, Gordon. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_9114
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