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Floyd Henry Allport (August 22, 1890 – October 15, 1979) was an American psychologist. Often considered "the father of experimental social psychology", Floyd Henry Allport played a key role in bringing about the acceptance of social psychology as a scientific field. His book, Social Psychology (1924), impacted all future writings in the field. He was particularly interested in public opinion, attitudes, morale, rumors, and behavior.

Biography
Allport was born on August 22, 1890, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to John Edward, a physician, and Nellie Edith Wise Allport, a school teacher. Allport had three brothers: Fayette W., and Harold E., and Gordon W. Allport, also a psychologist. During Allport's childhood, the family moved from Wisconsin to Ohio, and after graduating from Glenville High, Allport moved to Cambridge to attend Harvard University. Allport received his A.B. in psychology in 1913 and his Ph.D in 1919. In between degrees, from October 1917 until June 1918, he served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Expeditionary Forces in World War I. Allport's first marriage was to Ethel Margaret Hudson on October 5, 1917. His second marriage to Helene Willey Hartley, was on September 5, 1938. Allport had three children: Edward Herbert, Dorothy Fay, and Floyd Henry, Jr.

From 1919 to 1922, Allport was an instructor in psychology at Harvard and Radcliffe, and then until 1924 he was an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 1924, Allport became one of the original faculty members at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. He was a full professor of Social and Political Psychology until 1956. In 1957, after 32 years at Syracuse University, Allport became visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He retired from teaching that year in Los Altos, California. He died in California on October 15, 1978.

Allport published numerous books and articles in the field of psychology. Three of his most influential books are Social Psychology, Institutional Behavior, and Theories of Perception and the Concept of Structure.

Social Psychology
Although Allport’s experimental work first appeared in 1920, his major impact came with the appearance of his Social Psychology, in 1924. This book provided an excellent integration of the relevant psychological knowledge of the time including: group experimentation, personality research, and related areas in general psychology such as child development, and applied psychology. With an emphasis on psychology more so than sociology, its behavioristic translation of Freudian concepts of conflict and its use of Freudian mechanisms in relation to social problems set the stage for later attempts at linking the two approaches. Among other topics, this volume presented Allport’s own classic experiments on group influence—research that made group experimentation one of the central streams of social psychology for most of the years of its history. In fact, the well-known experiments of Muzafer Sherif on the formation of group norms (1935) and of Solomon Asch on the power of the group (1952) were but extensions of Allport’s findings. Allport's Social Psychology provided a set of useful concepts for research—specifically, his notions of social facilitation, social increment and decrement, prepotent reflexes and habits, afferent and efferent conditioning, circular and linear social behavior, coacting and interacting groups, the impression of universality, attitudes of conformity, and self-expressive social attitudes.

Institutional Behavior
Institutional Behavior, in which Allport analyzed such institutions as the nation, the church, the law, and the industrial complex in terms of the motivations, attitudes, and habits of people, was published in 1933. This volume played a major role in getting social scientists to rethink their conceptualizations and utilize to empirical research to test their theories. Institutional Behavior was based partly upon Allport’s theoretical study of accepted doctrines about social institutions and partly upon the research of his students on legal compliance, conformity in industrial settings, ceremonial religious observance, and the factors determining normative behavior in a small community. In this program of research Allport developed the concepts of pluralistic ignorance, partial inclusion, and public and private attitudes and the J-curve theory of conforming behavior.

Theories of Perception
Allport's Theories of Perception (1955) has been widely regarded as the most scholarly and the most incisive analysis of theories of perception available at that date. It also presents some of Allport’s own theories of individual and social behavior.

His theory, which he terms an event-system theory, is something of an open-system approach that sees social structure as being made up of cycles of events that return upon themselves to complete each cycle. Social structure has no anatomical or physical basis apart from the events themselves, so that social systems are made up of the interstructuring of specific acts: “Causation, in the structural view, is not historical nor linear, but continuous, time independent, and reciprocally cyclical. One looks for it neither in society nor in the individual, as traditionally seen as separate levels or agencies, but in the compounded patterns of structuring which are the essential reality underlying both.” Individuals relate to one another to maintain the intrinsic rewards from their patterned behavior as well as the more indirect rewards, including the assurances that the structure will be maintained. For Allport a group norm does not so much determine the behavior of individuals as provide a stipulation that will conduce to the creation or preservation of a structure (patterned activity) in which individuals have some degree of involvement. From this theory Allport has proceeded to measure degree of structurance—i.e., potency of involvement— through a negative-causation technique. The relevance of behavior to the structure in question is measured by an index of interstructure to get at the reinforcing or inhibiting effects received from related structures. The individual is thus seen as a matrix of involvements in many collective structures, with his own personality system a tangential structure. In one study, for example, Morse and Allport showed that hostility toward minority groups was a function of involvement in the national structure, whereas feelings of aversion toward minority group members were more clearly related to the personality syndromes of the prejudiced people.