Allport's Theory Of Personality

Personality is a broad and multidimensional concept therefore it is differentlydefined by various psychologists. Some psychologists use this term to describe individual differences regarding emotional, social and intellectual functioning. While some other just focus on social and emotive characteristics of individuals (Malim, Birch, Hayward, &Wadeley, 1998). Pervin, Cervone, and John (2005) define personality as characteristics that refer to consistent patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving. The definition broadly addresses different aspects of person and explains regularities in feelings, thoughts and behavioral patterns. Child (1968) explained personality as more or less stable, internal factors that make one person’s behavior consistent

By personality structure trait, psychologists mean the pattern of covariation among these traits, usually summarized in terms of a relatively small number of factors that represent the basic dimensions of personality (McCrae & Costa, 1997). Today’s trait theories of personality are largely based on the work of GordenAllport, Raymond Cattell and Hans Eysenck. Allport looked at nearly 18000 dictionary terms that can be used for describing human behavior but he noticed that clusters of terms refer to the same thing. For example, hostile, nasty and mean, all convey a similar meaning. Allport believed that the set of labels that describe a particular person reflects that person’s central traits (those that are usually obvious to others and that organize and control behavior in many different situations). He also believed that people possess secondary traits (those that are more specific to certain situations and control far less behavior). Allport’s research helped to lay the foundation for modern research on personality traits. His focus on the uniqueness of each personality made it difficult to draw conclusions about the structure of personality in general (Bernstein,

This model of personality has steadily emerged over the past 25 years as a comprehensive taxonomy of individual differences in human personality (John &Srivastava, 1999), and thus provides a standard framework within which many other specific personality constructs can be better understood. McCrae and Costa (1987) conceptualize personality along five broad dimensions including neuroticism, extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, andopenness to