Gordon Allport's 15 Best Phrases
Gordon Allport (United States, 1897 - 1967) was a prominent American psychologist who devoted his life to researching the human personality.
Despite his enormous influence in the field of the psychology of the people, Gordon Allport is a figure frequently forgotten when they are listed to the main psychologists of century XX. Professor of the prestigious Harvard University, among those who were his disciples we can find such famous names as Jerome Bruner, Stanley Milgram or Thomas Pettigrew.
- Related article: "The 10 best famous quotes of George H. Mead"
Gordon Allport quotes and quotes
All in all, the contributions of Allport are unpayable and is one of the most studied theorists in the faculties of Psychology. Several studies place him as the 11th most-quoted psychologist in the 20th century .
In today's article we will learn more about the figure of psychologist Gordon Allport through his most memorable quotes and phrases.
1. People who are aware or who are ashamed of their prejudices are also those who are on the way to eliminating them.
In contrast, those who are proud of them are rarely able to see beyond.
2. Personality "is" and "does". The personality is what is hidden behind specific acts and within the individual.
The engine of our behavior and our way of being.
3. If a person is able to rectify his erroneous judgments in the light of new evidence, then he has no prejudices. Prejudices only become prejudices if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge. A prejudice, unlike a simple misconception, is actively resistant to all the evidence that would destabilize it. We tend to grow emotionally when a prejudice is threatened by contradiction. Thus, the difference between common errors of judgment and prejudices is that a judgment error can be discussed and rectified without emotional resistance.
In this famous phrase, Gordon Allport clearly explains the difference between prejudices and errors of judgment.
4. Love, incomparably the best psychotherapeutic agent, is something that professional psychiatry can not by itself create, concentrate or release.
On the capacity of love to repair emotional wounds.
5. As supporters of our own lifestyle, we can not stop thinking in a partisan way.
Another phrase by Gordon Allport that focuses on cognitive biases.
6. The theist is convinced that while nothing that contradicts science is likely to be true, yet nothing that stops with science can be the whole truth.
On how beliefs determine our attitudes.
7. The specific objectives we set are almost always subsidiary to our long-term intentions. A good father, a good neighbor, a good citizen, is not good because his specific objectives are acceptable, but because his successive objectives are ordered to a set of reliable and socially desirable values.
In this famous quote, Gordon Allport explains how the actions and goals of the day to day maintain a coherence in the long term for each individual and their self-concept.
8. The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never less. In fact, the measure of our intellectual maturity, suggests a philosopher, is our ability to feel less and less satisfied with our responses to better problems.
This is how philosophy advances and, with it, the knowledge we have about reality.
9. Reason adapts impulses and beliefs to the real world. Rationalization, on the other hand, adapts the concept of reality to the impulses and beliefs of the individual. The reasoning discovers the true cause of our actions, rationalization finds good reasons to justify our actions.
Another phrase about the role of our beliefs and our rational apparatus at the moment of thinking about our own actions.
10. Frustrated lives have hatred more conditioned by character.
Do you know the difference between character, personality and temperament? Allport points out a feature he observed in many real cases.
11. Mental openness is considered a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it can not happen. A new experience must be lived and assumed in old categories that already exist in our mind. We can not handle each event by itself. If so, would past experience be useful?
One of the personality traits, the openness to experience, and a reflection of Allport on how our cognition lives these new realities.
12. There is an anecdote about an Oxford student who once commented: "I despise all Americans, but I have never met one that I do not like."
Another famous phrase by Gordon Allport about prejudices.
13. Mature religious feeling is ordinarily formed in the workshop of doubt.
As Carl Gustav Jung would say, religiosity could be the overcompensation of doubt.
14. Each person is a language for himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
Language and communication were also interesting areas of study for Gordon Allport.
15. The love received and the love offered constitute the best form of therapy.
Can love be a therapeutic tool? Few psychologists question it.
