Obituary: Floyd H Allport (1890-1978)

October 15, 1978 was a dark day for psychology, for it marked the passing of one of its Olympian figures, Floyd Henry Allport. Floyd Allport was the father of experimental social psychology. He was the first to apply experimental methods systematically to the study of group process and social relationships. Social psychology is often assigned 1908 as its birth date because that is the year Edward Ross and William McDougall brought out their systematic treatises on social psychology. But it was not until the appearance of Allport’s Social Psychology in 1924 that we had a text based heavily on experimental and research studies. This text made the field, which before its appearance had seen few and scattered courses. Moreover, Allport’s continuing contributions in the form of theory and research marked the major avenues along which social psychology was to travel in later decades. Allport was both a distinguished theorist and a creative methodologist. His early formulation of a sophisticated behaviorism and his later event-system theory anticipated developments in the field and in some respects are still in advance of them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)