Floyd Henry Allport

Introduction

Floyd Henry Allport (22 August 1890 – 15 October 1979) was an American psychologist widely described as the father of experimental social psychology. He insisted that social behaviour could and should be studied in the laboratory with the same rigour as perception or learning, and he rejected the then-fashionable idea that groups possess a mind of their own. His 1924 textbook Social Psychology introduced the concept of social facilitation and set the empirical agenda for decades of American research. He is frequently confused with his younger brother, Gordon Allport, who is the better-known figure today; the two worked on overlapping problems from very different angles, and Floyd was the more committed experimentalist of the pair.

Early Life and Education

Allport was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the second of four sons of John Edward Allport, a physician, and Nellie Edith Wise Allport. The family moved to Ohio during his childhood and he graduated from Glenville High School before going east to Harvard University. He received his A.B. in psychology in 1913 and his PhD in 1919, studying under Edwin B. Holt, a student of William James, and Hugo Münsterberg. Between the two degrees he served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Expeditionary Forces from October 1917 to June 1918. His youngest brother Gordon followed him into psychology, and the sibling relationship became an enduring point of comparison in the field.

Academic and Professional Career

Allport stayed at Harvard as an instructor in psychology from 1919 to 1922, teaching also at Radcliffe, then moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an associate professor. In 1924 he was recruited as one of the original faculty of the newly founded Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, an institution created explicitly to bring social scientists together. He was appointed chair, built the first doctoral programme in social psychology, and remained at Syracuse for thirty-two years, holding a full professorship of social and political psychology until the mid-1950s. In 1957 he took a visiting professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, and retired in Los Altos, California.

Alongside his teaching, Allport was an influential editor. From 1921 he worked on the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, which broadened its remit in 1925 to become the Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Social Psychology and soon became an official periodical of the American Psychological Association. During the Second World War he studied rumour and civilian morale, examining why people believe subversive rumours and how news content shapes morale, work carried out with a graduate group he called the "Morale Seminar." Syracuse University's archival finding aid credits him with the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award and the association's Gold Medal, and records a 1957 Sigma Xi research award for his work on a dynamic-structural theory of behaviour.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Allport's defining claim was that social psychology is a branch of psychology and not of sociology, and that its subject matter is the behaviour of individuals in social situations. In Social Psychology (1924) he offered a behaviouristic reading of concepts that had previously been handled speculatively, and introduced a vocabulary — social facilitation, afferent and efferent conditioning, social increment and decrement, circular and linear social behaviour, prepotent reflexes, the impression of universality, coacting versus interacting groups — that shaped the field's descriptive apparatus. The book also took direct aim at William McDougall's instinct theory, arguing that inherited instincts could not explain the variety of social behaviour and that explanation had to proceed through measurable mechanisms.

The concept for which Allport is best known is social facilitation: the finding that an individual's performance changes when others are present. His 1920 paper, "The influence of the group upon association and thought," reported that people produced more associations and did so faster when working alongside others than when working alone, and he gave the phenomenon its name in the 1924 book. Norman Triplett had reported a similar effect in 1898, but Allport's formulation and his insistence on measuring it under controlled conditions made it a standard laboratory problem. Later work complicated the picture considerably: the effect proved sensitive to the difficulty of the task, and subsequent reviews attributed most of the audience effect to evaluation apprehension and distraction-conflict processes rather than to the mere presence of others, which is how Allport had framed it.

Against the Group Mind

In a series of papers in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Allport conducted a sustained campaign against what he called group fictions: reified concepts such as "group mind," "collective consciousness," and "national character" that attribute psychological properties to collectivities. His position was methodological individualism carried to its limit — there is no psychology of groups that is not entirely a psychology of individuals. He insisted on explicit operational denotation as the test of whether a concept was scientifically usable, an argument that anticipated later operationalism. The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences assessment of this campaign is balanced: his attack was extreme, but it forced social scientists to rethink their conceptualisations and to move from armchair theorising to empirical test.

The J-Curve Hypothesis

From the observation that attitudes and behaviours under a rule are not normally distributed, Allport developed the J-curve hypothesis of conforming behaviour (1934; foreshadowed in Institutional Behavior, 1933). In situations governed by a custom or an institution — arriving on time for lectures, stopping at a stop sign, participating in religious observance — the overwhelming majority comply closely, and the proportion of people falls away sharply as deviation increases, producing a reverse-J distribution. He measured conformity not on a scale of conformity itself, which he recognised would be tautological, but on what he called a telic continuum: the degree to which the behaviour fulfils the purpose the institution exists to serve. He and his students, including Richard Schanck and Milton Dickens, gathered distributions on traffic behaviour, church attendance, and classroom punctuality, and he argued that the J-shape is produced by pressures to conform and would otherwise be a flat distribution of chance.

Attitudes, Public Opinion, and Partial Inclusion

Allport was among the first political behaviourists. With Daniel Katz he documented the student culture of a university and its subsystems in Students' Attitudes (1931), and his early attempts at attitude scaling were acknowledged by L. L. Thurstone as a starting point for the development of Thurstone's classical attitude-scaling methods. His 1925 study with D. H. Hartman reported that political extremists at both ends of the spectrum share basic personality characteristics. The Syracuse programme also produced concepts that outlived their origin: pluralistic ignorance, partial inclusion, and the distinction between public and private attitudes, all of which remain current in the study of conformity and group norms.

Event-System Theory

In his later career Allport grew dissatisfied with his own behaviourism, which he thought neglected relationships and social structure, and developed a highly abstract event-system theory, presented in Theories of Perception and the Concept of Structure (1955). Social structure, in this view, has no anatomical basis; it consists of cycles of events that return upon themselves. Causation is neither historical nor linear but continuous and reciprocally cyclical, located in patterns of structuring rather than in society or the individual conceived as separate levels. He attempted to measure the degree of "structurance" through a negative-causation technique and an index of interstructure.

Major Publications

"The influence of the group upon association and thought" (1920), the paper that established social facilitation as a laboratory problem.
Social Psychology (1924), the textbook that defined the field as an experimental science.
Institutional Behavior (1933), an analysis of the motives, habits, and attitudes of people working within institutions such as the nation, the church, the law, and industry.
"The J-curve hypothesis of conforming behavior" (1934), the fullest statement of the conformity distribution.
Theories of Perception and the Concept of Structure (1955), both a widely praised critical survey of perception theory and the vehicle for his event-system theory.

Impact and Legacy

Allport's conception of social psychology dominated American research for decades and made the experiment the default method of the field. Attitude measurement, the study of rumour and morale, and the laboratory analysis of group effects all descend from his programme, and his insistence on operational definition changed how social concepts are specified. His critique of group fictions remains a standard reference point, even for researchers who reject his conclusions.

The criticisms are as durable as the contributions. His attack on the group mind went further than later evidence supports: the minimal-group experiments of social identity research showed that group membership alone can generate ingroup favouritism, and phenomena such as norms, roles, and collective behaviour have proven resistant to reduction to individual psychology. Relatedly, his methodological individualism and his laboratory emphasis are held partly responsible for an American social psychology that, by the 1960s, was criticised for being ahistorical and detached from social context — a charge pressed most forcefully during the field's so-called crisis of the 1970s.

The J-curve hypothesis has fared worse still and is now largely forgotten. It was criticised for measuring only under-conformity and ignoring over-conformity, with the suggestion that the J-curve is simply the right-hand half of an ordinary normal distribution, the left half being the people who arrive early or stop well short of the line. Allport replied that most rules define a threshold not to be crossed and that exceeding the requirement is socially inconsequential, so measuring the left half would be pointless; he also rejected the argument that his distributions were disguised normal curves. Neither reply settled the matter, and the hypothesis did not enter the mainstream of conformity research. His late event-system theory, though scholarly, never attracted a following; the standard assessment is that the 1955 book is remembered for its survey of perception theory rather than for the theoretical system it was written to introduce. Finally, his greatest success has been held against him: by making the experiment the gold standard, he helped produce a discipline that was rigorous about method and, in the eyes of its critics, thin about meaning.

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References

Allport, F. H. (1924). Social Psychology. Houghton Mifflin.