ABSTRACT
Allport made genuine advances in many areas of psychology. In order to develop his science of personality, He began by going through the dictionary and identifying every single lexical item that could be used to describe a person. His trawl pulled in 4500 trait-like words. In these lexical descriptors, the words used in everyday life, he saw the start of a new scientific theory of personality, rooted in the stuff of everyday life, in the words that we use consciously and deliberately to describe other people. It was four years later, in 1924 at Harvard, that Allport began what was in all likelihood the very first course on personality in the United States – ‘Personality: Its Psychological and Social Aspect’. It was the kind of course that could well fit into the modern psychology curriculum. He went on to develop theories and write books on prejudice, the psychology of rumour and the concept of the self, developing the careers of many outstanding social psychologists including Jerome Bruner, Stanley Milgram, Leo Postman, Thomas Pettigrew and M. Brewster Smith. Another of his students was Anthony Greenwald, whom we shall be encountering in a subsequent chapter. Given Allport’s stance on Freud’s fixed attentional gaze on the unconscious, it is highly ironic that Greenwald is best known for taking one of Allport’s core concepts, the attitude, and detailing the unconscious or implicit aspects of it; indeed, he challenged the whole basis for identifying and measuring it, but more of this later.
