What is Personality - Part 2 - Allport vs Freud

The Trait Model

Allport, a young American psychologist at the time, was traveling through Europe. He decided to make a detour and go to Vienna to meet Freud in person. From this encounter, the young psychologist left with some bitterness, but also with a strong conviction that not everything in life has a deep or hidden meaning, and that sometimes people are exactly what they say they are.

Allport began his journey by studying the most valid definitions of personality of his time, concluding that "personality is the dynamic organization, within the individual, of those psychophysical systems that determine his characteristic thoughts and behavior" (Allport, 1961).

In this definition we understand that personality simultaneously has a structure and doesn't always remain the same ("dynamic organization"), is both psychological and biological ("psychophysical"), and is the reason behind a person's behaviors and thoughts ("determines").

To study personality, Allport and his colleague Odbert started at the source. They decided to examine every word in the dictionary (Webster's New International Dictionary), convinced that the most relevant differences between people would inevitably end up being expressed in everyday language. So everything that a personality could be would be written in the dictionary.

They identified 17,953 words that referred to aspects of behavior and ways of being. This undertaking became known as the lexical hypothesis, an idea that had already been put into practice earlier by Francis Galton in 1854.
From the initial list, they went on to establish new criteria that allowed them to reduce the findings to 1,000 personality-describing words. These would be words like extraverted, introverted, funny, serious, honest, friendly, aggressive, sad...

Allport called these words Personality Traits, explaining that a Trait is the designation given to the psychophysical systems that perpetuate an individual's behavior/thoughts in a more or less stable way, regardless of the situation (making variable stimuli equivalent). More specifically, a trait is literally the way we use to describe someone or ourselves.

Traits can also be divided into 3 types:

• Cardinal: these are dominant traits and are the most determining force behind a person's actions. Not everyone has cardinal traits — that is, characteristics that explain all or nearly all of their actions.

• Central: these are other characteristics that are also present but not as powerful as cardinal ones.

• Secondary: these are small peculiarities unique to the person but not necessary to understand them.

An example of a cardinal trait would be any word we can use to describe most of another person's actions. For instance, we might say someone has the cardinal trait of "friendly" when, regardless of the situation, that person is friendly with everyone. If the person is only friendly in certain situations, then it's a central or secondary trait. Secondary traits, on the other hand, are smaller things like preferring comedy movies over horror movies, or liking Magnums over Cornettos...

2.1. How to Understand Personality from This Perspective

Allport believed that traits don't operate in the same way across different people, since each person is unique and would therefore need to be studied individually, particularly through longitudinal case studies.
He also believed that indirect methods of measuring personality, like the Rorschach (the inkblot cards), didn't work, explaining that a well-adjusted person (that is, without unconscious conflicts) would reveal their conscious interpretation on the test, and that for that, you could simply ask the person directly.

However, the work on personality traits created the foundation for one of the most concise models of our time — the Big Five / Five-Factor Model, which we'll look at later.

References