Personality psychology: what are the thoughts of Allport and Maslow? - Chapter 12

As discussed earlier, Titchener was involved in a new scientific approach of psychology, namely structuralism. He had tried to scientifically analyse experiences, but in the form of the most elementary sensations and feelings. Titchener was the opponent of Freud. The invitation that Gordon W. Allport (1897-1967) received for the conference "Society of Experimentalists", set up by Titchener, was probably one of the biggest mistakes he’s made, considering Allport was more focused on the subject of personality. Titchener responded negatively to Allport and belittled him during the conference. The disappointment in Allport was temporary, however, because he was the first to teach at the university in personality psychology.

Abraham H. Maslow (1908-1970) also could not find himself in Titchener's model. Allport and Maslow were similar to each other in the fact that they are both regularly the limits of psychology and searched for, but that was also just about it. Allport was interested in personality psychology, in which the subjects varied from individual case studies to statistical analysis of mutual relationships on a large scale. Maslow was interested in which factors caused people to be "normal" or "healthy". He formulated an influential theory on human motives, as they are in a hierarchy and became a supporter of humanistic psychology. Both theories formulated by Maslow and Allport were an important part of the development and evolution of modern psychology as we know it today.

Who was Gordon W. Allport (1897-1967)?

Allport became fascinated by his teacher Munsterberg at Harvard, who felt that there were two fundamentally different types of psychology: Firstly, psychology is causal and objective, and is aimed at emphasizing deterministic and mechanistic relationships between specific stimuli and the reactions they produce. The other kind of psychology is purposeful and subjective, which requires psychologists to gain insight into certain thinking processes and perspectives of the participants and to share these insights.

After graduating, Allport became an English and Sociology teacher at a small school in Turkey. Later on he returned to Harvard for a PhD in psychology. He always had great admiration for the psychoanalysis and promoted this to academic psychologists. As an assistant to Floyd, he learned a lot about new developments in psychology. One of these topics was personality. Some psychologists were interested in measuring non-intellectual characteristics with personality tests. The corresponding concept of personality studies, according to Allport, was the focus on individual differences in properties. They suggested a model for of personality, consisting of four groups: intelligence, temperament, self-expression and sociality. In Hamburg, Allport met the professor William Stern (1871-1938), an advocate of the personalistic psychology, where the central concept is "the person" and the goal is to understand the individuality of the person. Stern felt that there are two ways to approach this problem:

To start with, one could examine the relational individuality. This is defined by to measure the relative or statistical position of an individual on a widely varied scale with character traits. When the number of character traits is large, two people can never exactly have the same pattern of scores, even though they look so much alike when only a small one number of character traits was measured. For Stern the actual individuality weighed heavier. This is a Gestalt-like approach where the unique self is more than the sum of the individual properties. 

Actual individuality could not only be approached by the statistical comparison with another person but had to be judged on the basis of the mutual relations between qualities inside the person himself. This was only possible through the investigation of the life history of the individual. Together with Philip Vernon (1905-1987), Allport published an investigation into expressive movements, using a pencil-and-paper test which they called "a test of values". This test measures the relative preferences of individuals for propositions that reflect six kinds of values (theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political and religious). Ross Stagner (1909-1997) published a book about family influences on personality traits. His book was, however, written independently of Allport's book, and gave a more behaviourist focused research again. Both books were equally successful.

What is the personality theory of Allport?

In the book of Allport, ‘Personality: A psychological interpretation’, it is emphasized that the most prominent characteristic of people's individuality is that and the goal of personality psychology is to understand and appreciate individuality. The pursuit of this goal provided a problem for the scientific psychology. In science, one is often focused on it establishing generalizations (matches in characteristics of groups of objects). In his book, Allport presented solutions for the two problems that he encountered during the run of his career: 1) the "blank page" dilemma and 2) the problematic role of psychoanalysis and other depth psychologies when studying normal personalities.

In conceptualizing personality psychology, Allport identified two contrasting research styles that he called nomothetic and ideographical. The nomothetical research studies study people in terms of general laws or characteristics where people are in a quantitative degree can vary. Idiographic research is focused on researching and describing that which makes a person unique. The method used is often qualitative. The nomothetic methods were used to describe the causal, objective psychology of Münsterberg and to pursue the relational individuality of Stern. The idiographic method was more appropriate for the targeted psychology of Münsterberg and the research into the real individuality of Stern. Allport approved both types of research forms. He himself made mainly use of the nomothetical research form. However, he was of the opinion that the nomothetical research form in itself was insufficient to create a complete concept of personality psychology. To fully understand the personality, it was necessary to conduct idiographic research, mainly focused on the mutual relationships between the character traits of an individual.

Allport recognized the popularity of psychoanalysis and felt that before Freud came with psychoanalysis, the impulsive emotion was often ignored. However, Allport was of the opinion that Freud's concepts were mainly derived from the inductive investigation of unbalanced people with predominantly anxious personalities, so that they are not could be completely used in people with a normal developmental course. Despite that generalizations of Freud could be valid; the validity was limited to the abnormal population. Allport thus provided two fundamental lessons in personality psychology. Firstly, he was of the opinion that when goes with "normal" personalities, they had to deal seriously with their own conscious self-reports and had to appreciate it for what they were. If you wanted to know something about other people, you first have to ask them what it is and do not have to assume that the reactions were distorted by unconscious factors. In addition, one should not pathologize equal normal adult behaviours by linking them to motifs and fixations from childhood. Freud made these two mistakes. 

Allport did not deny that many character traits, such as cleanliness and orderliness came from experiences from childhood, but he felt that the character traits sometimes strengthened or maintained or strengthened because they were in the maturity itself were also rewarding. These character traits then manifest themselves as functional autonomy, coming from childhood.

Which other researchers did Allport stimulate?

Cattell (1905-1998) had dealt with the emerging techniques of factor analysis, a collection of statistical procedures with which the mutual correlations between a large number individual variables can be reduced to smaller "factors", "clusters" or "principled components ". Cattell had tried to apply these techniques to intelligence keys.

After Cattell met Allport, he got the idea to take measurements on the individual character traits, to see if he could combine them into smaller groups of factors. His results showed that the thousands of individual character traits could be reduced to sixteen personality factors, with each factor being defined as a collection of strongly interrelated character traits. Each factor stood for one dimension, where individuals could vary between two extremes. Cattell and his colleagues also developed the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF), a multiple-choice test for measuring the factors found. The possibility that the sixteen personality factors could be reduced to even fewer factors was not excluded, and this yielded eventually to five major categories.

Hans J. Eysenck (1916-1997) did like Allport’s ideas in many ways, but he pointed out the idiographic methods and insisted that the field should only be nomothetic. Together with his colleagues, Eysenck managed to reduce the hundreds of individual character traits to only three primary clusters (or factors), also called the PEN model of personality:

· Extraversion and introversion.

· Degree of neuroticism (related to the tendency to experience anxiety).

· Degree of psychoticism (related to the voluntary / involuntary tendency to over the the boundaries of everyday reality).

The model of Cattell, consisting of the five dimensions, is generally accepted. Also the general Eysenck's factors were accepted, although they were replaced by three new ones dimensions that were called by the names openness (imagination, sensitivity and attention to the inner feelings), rigor (the tendency to be cautious and self-disciplined) and pleasantness (the tendency to show co-operation and empathy to others). All these dimensions together are called the Big Five (or OCEAN).

What idiographic approaches are there?

Together with Christiana Morgan (1897-1967), Henry A. Murray (1893-1988) developed the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), in which participants were shown a standardized a collection of images. They were asked to tell a story about it. The varying stories reflected individual differences in the personality of the participants. Partly guided by the conceptual scheme by which individuals were motivated (often unconsciously) through 27 psychogenic needs (which were created in different ways by environmental factors), participants provided a detailed report on their subject. The needs in the system included the search for connection with others, the degree of success in overcoming obstacles, power (or domination over others) and the autonomy or independence of others.

More recently, a group of psychologists has formed into the Society of Personology, an organization that has explicitly focused on developing and promoting the method of Murray. A number of psychologists have worked together to establish guidelines for it by writing a psychobiography, explicitly using psychodynamic personality theories to shed light on the life story of a person. The personologists have published a handbook for psychobiography together, which describes that individual life can best be approached and conceptualized as three separate but complementary levels. The first level emphasizes the relatively stable construction, or character traits, such as the psychometric "Big Five". The second level is more focused on the personal qualities, such as goals, motives, needs and values, but more in the context of the life experiences of an individual. This is assessed by several techniques, including TAT and personal interviews. The third level explores the life stories of the individual, where one is mainly focused on the self, which integrates the other material and meaning in terms of identity, unity, thematic consistency, and so on.

What did the future career of Allport look like?

In one of his books, written in 1950, Allport made a distinction between immature and adult religion. In immature religion, one is attached to one's own religion and has mainly accepted said religion for self-glorification reasons. They are also non-reflective and intolerant of other cultures and religions. In adult religion, one accepts ignorance and mystery with respect to questions. It encourages humility and tolerance towards others as well. A certain aspect that occurred in immature religion was prejudice against others. This was also what Allport was interested in. He defined a prejudice as an antipathy, based on a false and non-flexible generalization of a community or situation. He described the levels on which these prejudices could occur within a person or society. At the lowest level the majority (members of the in-group) makes denigrating jokes about the minority (members of the out-group). Despite the fact that the adverse consequences of such jokes are often overlooked, this is possible behaviour lead to avoidance of the out-group, followed by active discrimination and active aggression. Allport also formulated the contact hypothesis, suggesting that prejudices between groups can be reduced if the members of the in-group and the out-group are to be placed in a situation where they have to work together, with a common goal for both of the groups.

Who was Abraham Maslow?

Maslow (1908-1970) was influenced by many different scientists. From the anthropologists, Maslow had learned that human nature is often more complex (and broader) than psychologists often thought. Of the neo-Freudians, Maslow had learned that there were different motives that formed human behaviour, and often also led to positive goals. From de Gestalt psychologists Maslow learned to use the creativity and emphasize positive aspects of thought processes. Various scientists are discussed and in what way they have affected Maslow.

At university, Maslow was introduced to William Sheldon (1898-1977), who had just started with developing an approach in which he combined behaviouristic methodology with a theory about body types ("somatotypes"). Sheldon classified bodies like ectomorphic (thin and slightly muscular), endomorphic (relatively high in body fat) or mesomorphic (muscular) and then examined the relationships between each body type and the different personality traits.

Alfred Adler (1870-1937)

Alfred Adler (1870-1937) was an advocate of individual psychology. Adler was of the belief that Freud had put too much emphasis on sexuality. According to him, the motivation was in the helplessness and weakness of babies, which gave rise to an inferiority complex. The form of this inferiority complex varies and depends on the circumstances and environmental expectations. According to Adler, in all cases children develop strong motives to deal with the inferiority and to overcome it. Either, for rulership, power and to gain dominance over the environment.

When Harry Harlow arrived at the university, Maslow joined him to study apes for different reasons. As a behaviourist he knew that his research was objective and should be free from subjective or introspective reports. Primates, based on the phylogenetic scale are very similar to humans, share some important social characteristics with people. Maslow noted that primates in colonies regularly became involved behaviours that could be classified as sexual or related to status a hierarchy of dominance. Maslow noted that Freud emphasized sexuality and Adler dominance, and decided to observe the monkeys systematically. From these observations concluded Maslow that despite the fact that sexual and dominant motives had independent causes, in practice, it often happened that these behaviour actually interacted. And even then dominance seemed to be more present than pure sexuality. Sexual behaviour was often used to secure dominance.

What was the influence of Ruth Benedict (1887-1948)?

Maslow was impressed by Benedict, an anthropologist, by both her personal and her professional qualities. In 1934 she published a book where she introduced the idea of "culture" within psychology, which could be seen as an analogy of "personality". In her book, she described three ethnic groups, each group with a different style of culture. In the "Appolonian" culture, rational and restrained behaviour was shown, while in the "Dionysian" society a more exuberant, emotional and relatively unbounded behaviour occurred. People from the "Paranoid" culture often tended to be suspicious and antagonistic. 

In 193,8 Benedict convinced Maslow himself to spend a few weeks together in the Indian society Western Canada. There he received an appreciation for 1) the fact that cultural factors had formed a collection conditions in which it was more / less likely that specific personality traits may occur less / more and 2) that all people share their  basic humanity and basic needs that outweigh cultural differences.

Who were Maslow's Neo-Freudian mentors?

After getting to know the next three mentors, Maslow felt that people were not motivated through a single motive, but through a complex network of biological, personal, social and cultural factors that all worked together.

Adler was an inspiration for Maslow. He learned a lot from him about his theory, mainly about the feeling of inferiority of an individual, which ultimately could have a positive outcome when a person has a powerful motive to overcome the uncomfortable feeling of inferiority. According to Adler, all people have an innate sense of social interest, an impulse to be cooperative to deal with fellow human beings. Despite the tendency to be disturbed by unhappy early experiences, Adler was of the opinion that it should be something "primary", of which the expression could be blocked by negative factors.

Maslow also learned a lot from Horney and Erich Fromm (1900-1980). Horney felt that the need for a child's safety is more important than the upcoming sexuality. Feelings of insecurity were also often accompanied by feelings of inferiority. Horney also strongly emphasized the role of culture in determining normal and abnormal behavioural patterns. One of the ideas that Fromm worked with, was about the conviction that people distinguish themselves from animals by their relative freedom to dominate the instincts. Helplessly born, and then dependent on others, we teach people how they can manipulate their environment and how they can make conscious decisions to make. However, a lot of freedom and awareness can also cause problems. Fromm called this the "Existential dichotomies" - unmanageable problems that are inevitably part of the human condition.

Who were the Gestalt mentors of Maslow?

Wertheimer felt that the main form of learning was not happening gradually or through trial-and-error, but rather by a sudden flash of insight ("Aha! moments", as this can also described as). The perception of Wertheimer on the topics of learning and creativity was what attracted Maslow the most. Some sort of father-son relationship between Wertheimer and Maslow arose, and Maslow was taught two lessons that he would still use a lot later in his career. 

First he emphasized the strong feelings of pleasure and other positive emotions often accompanied by the "Aha moments" when the world was suddenly observed in a new way. Maslow calls this peak experience. The second lesson was in the fact that Wertheimer believed that traditional psychology placed too much emphasis on deviations and illnesses, and too little on the positive aspects of human experiences. Via Wertheimer, Maslow also met Goldstein, who was known for his fascination with the human brain (as discussed earlier in previous chapters). Goldstein also came with the term "Self-actualization", which Maslow also uses later in his motivational theory.

What is the theory of human motivation by Maslow?

Maslow decided to study his mentors, and noted that they were productive, creative, social and altruistic. They also did not seem to be driven by a deprivation-based motivation system that had previously been proposed by clinical theories. Their needs seemed to come from within and were not taken out of the environment. Maslow tried to find a descriptive label for these extremely healthy individuals and decided to use the term Goldstein had come up with. 

According to Maslow, self-actualization occurs when the individual is doing what the person is made for / suitable for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint and poet must write if, they all want to be happy. Maslow developed five general categories of needs, in the form of a hierarchy. The most basic needs are called the physiological needs. When it is absent, the consequences may be catastrophic for the individual. When these needs are met, the need for safety arises. This is a requirement to be protected against threats. The needs manifest fairly early in children. Once on the physiological and safety needs are met, the need for love comes. These are strong desires for affection, friendship and the feeling that the person belongs to a social group hears. These needs can interact with each other but are independent of the physical based sexual need. 

If these needs are met, then one needs appreciation. This includes needs such as good self-confidence, success and reputation. Only when the first four levels are met, one gets the need for self-actualization. The first Maslow calls the first four levels the deprivation needs because they are created by imperfection and defects in life. These needs are in contrast to the "being needs" of self-actualization, where it concerns the need to make the possibilities of the self possible.

For his theory Maslow decided to study the people he saw as self-actualized. Maslow identified a number of characteristics that these self-actualizing participants distinguished. They often tend to be objective and efficient in their perception of the reality, just as they often have accurate judgments about people and situations at least distorted are their own emotions. They also often show a high acceptance of both himself and others. Often they are spontaneous, natural and problem-oriented. Nor do they quickly get distracted from their duties and have a sense of humour. They are often creative and independent in their judgments. Maslow noted that the self-actualizing people are often good at solving of dichotomies, or finding and performing behaviours to two opposite ones to be able to meet motives at the same time. The degree of peak experiences also varies per person.

Who were founding fathers of the humanistic psychology?

 Carl Rogers (1902-1987) was a client-oriented psychotherapist. He developed a non-directive accompaniment approach, using a technique that reflects (or look back) is called. Looking back at what a client has just said, it serves to show that the therapist is really listening and is really trying to understand the client. Also the therapist must not react threateningly and with respect to the client. The client who can do this can become self-aware, which may reduce the problems. Roger was of the opinion that everyone was born with a tendency to grow, what he called "actualization tendency". He also stated that the problems came from feelings of low self-esteem. People must therefore be approached by emphasizing the positive.

Rollo May (1909-1994) developed the existential psychotherapy, which is the search for meaning emphasized in life. In this, May had many similarities with Maslow and Rogers, and together they formed humanistic psychology. Maslow presented results of a "thought experiment," in which he became a society proposed by self-actualizing people. This utopian society he called eupsychia. He imagined the maximum freedom for people to complete their their full potential. Many of Maslow's ideas were included in positive psychology, formed by Martin Seligman (1942). Seligman introduced the influential concept "Learned helplessness" as an important factor in depressive states, which often overcome by means of cognitive behavioural therapy.

ExamTips

• How does OCEAN lie at the basis of all human behaviour?
• How has the conflict with Titchner influenced Allport?