Obituary
Floyd H. Allport (1890-1978)
October IS, 1978, was a dark day for psychology, for
it marked the passing of one of its Olympian figures,
Floyd Henry Allport. Floyd Allport was the father
of experimental social psychology. He was the first
to apply experimental methods systematically to .the
study of group process and social relationships. Social
psychology is often assigned 1908 as its birth date
because that is the year Edward Ross and William
McDougall brought out their systematic treatises on
social psychology. But it was not until the appearance
of Allport's Social Psychology in 1924 that we had
a text based heavily on experimental and research
studies. This text made the field, which before its
appearance had seen few and scattered courses. More-
over, Allport's continuing contributions in the form
of theory and research marked the major avenues
along which social psychology was to travel in later
decades. Allport was both a distinguished theorist
and a creative methodologist. His early formulation
of a sophisticated behaviorism and his later event-
system theory anticipated developments in the field
and in some respects are still in advance of them.
Floyd Allport was heavily influenced by his teachers
at Harvard, where he did both his undergraduate and
graduate work, receiving his doctorate in 1919 and
continuing his career there as instructor for three more
years. In particular, E. B. Holt and R. B. Perry
were significant figures for him. The social behavior-
ism and epistemological wisdom of Holt affected Floyd
throughout his life. McDougall, who came to Harvard
in 1920, was a negative-reference-group person for
him, in that Allport sought a more environmentalistjc
interpretation of behavior than the instinct doctrine
of that British evolutionist. The rebellion against the
popular theories of McDougall did not, however, mean
the rejection of all of McDougall's insights.
Floyd Allport was born in Milwaukee on August
22, 1890. His father was a physician and his mother
was a school teacher. Floyd was the second of four
sons: One became a lawyer, another served in the
diplomatic corps, and the youngest became another
famous psychologist—Gordon W. Allport. Music was
one of Floyd's early interests. He was a good pianist
and, as an undergraduate, thought he might major in
music. He was especially interested in composition,
but as he went on with his studies, anthropology and
psychology claimed him. In his autobiography he
refers to his "intense, almost burning curiosity about
Vol. 34, No. 4,351-3S3
nature" and this played a role in his choice of a
career and his life-long devotion to theoretical under-
standing.
His graduate career at Harvard was interrupted by
World War I, during which he was commissioned as
a second lieutenant in the field artillery. During his
first flight in an observation balloon he was shot down
over France by German artillery but parachuted to
safety. He was awarded the Croix de guerre but with
characteristic modesty confessed that he really had a
fear of heights and had jumped on the order of his
superior officer.
While an instructor at Harvard, Allport was called
on to become cooperating editor of the Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology. Morton Prince
broadened the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in
1921 to include social psychology. The first issue
of the new expanded journal had as its lead article
a paper entitled "Personality Traits: Their Classifica-
tion and Measurement" by F. H. Allport and G. W.
Allport, perhaps the single most influential article in
the early development of personality research. All-
port served as cooperating editor of the journal until
1925, when he was succeeded by Henry T. Moore
(who was succeeded in 1937 by Gordon W. Allport).
After Harvard Allport spent two years as an asso-
ciate professor of psychology at the University of
North Carolina as a colleague of John F. Dashiell.
His influence on Dashiell can be seen in the program
of experimentation launched by Dashiell on group pro-
cess and its applications to the jury system, published
in 193S in Murchison's Handbook of Social Psychol-
ogy. From North Carolina, Allport was called in 1924
to Syracuse University to the newly established Max-
well Graduate School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
This school was one of the first interdisciplinary in-
stitutes in the social sciences and prepared the way
for what was to become behavioral science. Allport
was given the title of professor of social and political
psychology, taught the first courses ever offered in
political psychology, and headed the first doctoral pro-
gram in social psychology. Allport held that title at
Syracuse until his retirement in 195 7.
Allport's experimental work first appeared in 1920
in his dissertation about the effect of the group on
the behavior of the individual—experiments that be-
came classics in the field. His work on social facili-
tation led to a series of studies such as those by
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST • APRIL 1979 • 351
Copyright 1979 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
0003-066X/79/3404-0351$00.75
Dashiell. But the major impact of Allport's work did
not come until the appearance of his book Social Psy-
chology in 1924. The book was an excellent integra-
tion of the empirical psychological knowledge of the
time relevant to social phenomena. It included group
experimentation, personality assessment, and related
areas in general psychology, child development, and
applied psychology. It made no attempt to deal with
the sociological theories of Marx, Durkheim, and
Weber, but it did combine Freudian theory with be-
haviorism, which was an unusual synthesis at the time.
Allport sought an operationalization of Freudian mech-
anisms in behavioral terms in dealing with problems
of conflict and interpersonal relationships. His inter-
pretation of the Oedipal conflict, namely, that the
attraction is primarily of the parent to the child of
the opposite sex, is currently a debated issue.
Finally, Social Psychology provided a useful set of
concepts for research and teaching. Social psycholo-
gists now had a language of their own to guide ex-
perimentation and stimulate discussion with such no-
tions as social facilitation, social increment and decre-
ment, attitudes of conformity, prepotent reflexes and
habits, afferent and efferent conditioning, circular and
linear social behavior, coacting and interacting groups,
self-expressive attitudes, and the impression of uni-
versality. To these were added over time the con-
cepts of pluralistic ignorance, partial inclusion, the
J curve of social conformity, and potency of involve-
ment.
Much of the development of the field along be-
havioral lines was the extension of Allportian con-
ceptualization. Sherif's later work on the develop-
ment of group norms was a different theoretical
approach to social conformity, but the essential ex-
perimental paradigm was the same. Asch also pushed
further in showing the power of the group over the
individual by making the majority unanimous in their
influential atteftipts. The concept of social facilita-
tion, which at first proved highly productive, became
dormant only to be revived in recent years by animal
experimenters and revitalized by the 1966 theoretical
formulation of Robert Zajonc.
AJLport also pioneered in methodology in going be-
yond the laboratory to study social phenomena in their
field settings. Though he was the first real social
experimentalist, he did not allow himself to become
a captive to a single type of technique. He sent his
students into the field, into religious and governmental
settings, into industry, into the community, and into
crowd situations to observe social realities at first
hand. A 1932 study by Schanck of discrepant private
and public behavior in a small community led to All-
port's conceptualization of pluralistic ignorance,
namely, a situation where private beliefs summate in
one direction and public beliefs on the same issue
summate in an opposite direction. Many field studies
352 • APRIL 1979 • AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST
documented Allport's J curve hypothesis of conform-
ing behavior, in which the institutional norm and
the personality norm do not correspond either in
mean value or in the nature of the dispersion.
What was to become a central area for investigation
of social psychology for decades—attitudes and their
determinants—early occupied the attention of Allport
and his students. With D. H. Hartman in 1925 he
demonstrated the similarity of personality patterns
of extremists on the left and on the right and thus
anticipated the reaction against Authoritarian Person-
ality by those who argued for the authoritarianism of
the left. His impact on methodology of attitude mea-
surement was-great in that he saw the inadequacies of
his own ingenious a priori scales and turned to L. L.
Thurstone for help. The results were the Thurstone
scales derived by psychophysical methods.
In the 1920s and into the 1930s, Allport waged a
continuing war against group fictions such as the group
mind and the institutional fallacy in which group con-
cepts were endowed with personality attributes. He
argued clearly and convincingly that the language of
data should not be confused with the language of meta-
phorical concepts. His criterion of explicit denota-
tion was developed as a methodological guide in the
study of social phenomena. Social scientists frequently
resisted the attack on their favorite theories but in
many cases did attempt to operationalize their con-
cepts. The net effect was the growth of empirical be-
havioral science.
Allport brought together his many analyses of social
institutions in his Institutional Behavior (1937) which
included 22 essays, seven of which had previously
appeared in Harper's magazine. These penetrating
accounts of the family, the law, the political order,
education, religion, business, child rearing, and sex
roles illustrate how much traditional stereotypes had
prevented social scientists from a realistic appreciation
of critical issues. His essay "Seeing Women as They
Are" reads like an article of the 1970s rather than
the 1930s. His chapter on "The Life Stream and
the Business Funnel" deals with the economic fun-
neling of modern institutions in which life becomes
organized around industrial motives, and it does much
to refute the notion of Allport as an individually
oriented psychologist.
His institutional analysis and his direction of field
research led Allport to a reconsideration of his early
behaviorism and to a concern with problems of rela-
tionships and of social structure. He spent the rest
of his life trying to develop a theory of behavior that
would take account of the structure of action in an
objective and scientific manner. His search for gen-
eral structural concepts pushed him to a general theory
of structure in nature. He studied physics, genetics,
and microbiology in his quest for a metatheory and
constantly revised his own theorizing to make it more
valid and precise. He held that social structure had
no anatomical or physical base but consisted of cycles
of events that return upon themselves to complete
and maintain the cycle. Significant structures or forms
were to be found in cyclical, patterned interpersonal
behavior. Group norms do not so much determine the
behavior of individuals as they provide a stipulation
for patterned activity in which individuals have some
degree of involvement. Allport used as one measure
of structurance the potency of involvement of individ-
uals in the structure by a negative causation device,
namely, how much effort the individual would make
to maintain the structure if it were threatened.
The individual can thus be seen as a matrix of in-
volvements in many collective structures with his or
her own personality or tangential structure. Instead of
accepting the personality theory of prejudice and dis-
crimination, in 1952 Allport and Morse showed that
hostility toward minority groups was more complex.
Hostile acts were related to involvement in the na-
tional structure, and feelings of aversion were related
to personality syndromes.
Allport's preoccupation with his theory, most of it
unpublished and incomplete, isolated him from his
fellow psychologists. In an attempt to reestablish
contacts for the introduction of his theory, Allport
brought out his Theories of Perception in'1955. This
review of theories of perception was widely acclaimed
as the most scholarly and incisive account of the per-
ception literature and is still a reference work for
courses in the field. Though the book contained the
type of thinking involved in Allport's own theory of
structure, it failed in its objective of bringing All-
portian theory to the psychological world. It was too
metatheoretical to have impact on social psychologists.
Whether Allport's unpublished writings will ever come
into the public arena depends in part on their com-
pleteness and on the diligence of his former students.
Allport was widely recognized for his professional
and scientific contributions. He served on the Board
of Directors of the American Psychological Associa-
tion (1928-1930) and as President of the Society for
the Psychological Study of Social Issues (1939-1940).
He received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution
Award of the American Psychological Association and
the Gold Medal Award of the American Psychological
Foundation. Syracuse University conferred an honor-
ary doctorate of humane letters on him in 1974.
The creativity of the man, apparent in his theoriz-
ing, also found artistic expression. He was an ac-
complished pianist, an excellent composer, and a first-
rate painter. He was president of the Associated
Artists of Syracuse. ,
Floyd Allport was not a platform orator but he
was a great teacher. Watching his keen mind in
action and observing his profound intelligence at
work was a rare privilege his students never forgot.
His character was as generous as the sweep of his in-
tellect. His word was stronger than any written con-
tract. His kindness was of that exceptional sort that
included empathy for his colleagues. He was a stim-
ulating mind, a piercing wit, and an understanding
comrade. In my graduate days he was our idol, and
the admiration and affection we had for him swelled
with the passing years.
DANIEL KATZ
University of Michigan
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