Personality and Social Encounter: Selected Essays

The unifying thesis is that personality is an open system—a concept Allport develops explicitly in the essay of that name—rather than a closed totality of traits, drives, or habits. Contemporary reviewers recognized that the collection documents Allport's sustained effort to formulate a framework encompassing the individual's organization while resisting the atomizing methods of mainstream psychology . He argues that personality has a locus, uniqueness, and inner congruence, and that any theory ignoring these features fails to account for human behavior. Crucially, the open system is future-oriented: people behave in terms of how they believe their actions will affect their future, not merely as recapitulations of their past. The essays on prejudice, rumor, and war apply this framework to social problems.

The open system concept, developed in the 1960 essay of that title, marks a maturation of Allport's thought beyond the trait-specific approach of his early work. A closed system is self-contained, explicable entirely by its internal elements and past inputs; an open system exchanges with its environment and is oriented toward future states. Allport argues personality must be conceived as the latter: the person reorganizes stimuli, develops at least partially autonomous motives, and directs behavior toward values and goals not reducible to prior conditioning . A contemporary reviewer noted that this essay, alongside "Geneticism versus Ego-Structure," represented fresh efforts to provide a framework for organizing knowledge, though Allport could offer only "the specifications for that framework" rather than a finished system .

The book functions as a retrospective map of Allport's intellectual development, showing how his social-psychological essays on prejudice, rumor, and war connect to his personality theory. Five of the essays had previously appeared in his 1950 collection The Nature of Personality, and the social essays include his well-known treatments of prejudice and religion . The essay "Prejudice in Modern Perspective," delivered in Durban, South Africa in 1956, is one of the volume's new pieces and exemplifies Allport's blend of scholarship and moral urgency . A reviewer for the American Journal of Sociology observed that the social essays are valuable for their presentation of psychic mechanisms but "less developed in their appreciation of the relevant social structures"—a limitation that contrasts with the more sociologically textured argument of The Nature of Prejudice.

Reviews were generally respectful but noted limitations. O. A. Oeser, writing in Contemporary Psychology in 1961, found the volume difficult to review briefly and praised Allport for surveying the landscapes behind and before psychology, saying his books "encourage and refresh us" . The American Journal of Sociology reviewer was more analytical, noting that apparent contradictions between essays reflect changes in Allport's thinking over time—particularly the shift from a strong trait approach in early essays to a more open-system view later. The reviewer also observed that Allport's revisions for the collection were "rather slight," meaning the essays retain their original historical character rather than presenting a fully harmonized system. The collection's value lies in documenting an evolving mind, not a closed doctrine.

In several essays, most notably "Scientific Models and Human Morals," Allport argues that psychology's dominant theoretical models conceive the person as a creature of infantile experience, biological drives, and earlier patterns of adjustment. But actual people, he insists, behave in terms of anticipated futures rather than completed pasts. The aphorism a reviewer quoted captures it: while people live their lives forward, psychologists busy themselves tracing them backward . This matters because it grounds Allport's rejection of strict psychoanalytic and behaviorist determinisms. It also connects to his concept of functional autonomy: motives can become independent of their origins, so explaining a present motivation by its historical source may be explanatory but not adequate to the person's current organization. The future-oriented stance is what makes personality an open rather than closed system.

Readers should approach it as a curated intellectual autobiography rather than a systematic treatise. The essays span 1929 to 1960 and were written for diverse occasions—some delivered orally, all previously published—so they vary in register and occasional purpose. Allport states in his preface that some chapters were revised, but the revisions were slight enough that tensions between early and late essays remain visible . The volume includes a complete bibliography of Allport's writings, making it a useful scholarly resource. Its value lies in convenience and retrospective coherence: scattered or out-of-print essays are gathered in one place, and their arrangement across five sections—approach to personality, motivation and structure, normative problems, group tensions, and perception and social programs—reveals the range of Allport's concerns and the underlying consistency of his convictions.