Gordon Allport

Gordon William Allport was born November 11, 1897, and spent his career rejecting the two dominant schools: psychoanalysis, which he found over-interpretive, and behaviorism, which he thought too shallow. He developed an eclectic trait-based theory that insisted on the uniqueness of each person and the primacy of present context over personal history. His influence came less from citation counts than from the breadth of his reach - he conceptualized rumor, prejudice, religion, traits - and from the students he shaped across decades of teaching at Harvard, among them Jerome Bruner, Stanley Milgram, and Thomas Pettigrew. A 2002 survey ranked him the 11th most-cited psychologist of the 20th century. He died October 9, 1967.