Adolf Hitler's Cardinal Traits

Most of the world can remember and recognize the occurrences of World War II, when the Jewish population struggled to survive one of the most brutal leaders in world history. The topic has always been an interesting one for myself growing up, because it is hard to imagine how one person could be so destructive to human life, solely based on their preferences. Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, initiated millions of deaths from 1934 until 1945 during World War II. The disturbing past events due to Hitler’s dictatorship has lead many questioning why would such a human want to completely wipe out an entire population. Why was there so much hatred in this man to want to make people suffer? I myself cannot help but wonder the deeper meaning

behind his motivations. Once we can look past his attained mighty leadership skills this man acquired, we will be able to see what portrayed this man to become violent, ruthless, and emotionless toward human life.
Gordon Allport, an American scholar, was one of the first psychologists to focus on personality.

He developed a trait theory emphasizing that each individual is unique and that the present was of importance towards personality rather than focusing on the past. Allport used a dictionary to make a list of 4,500 words that describe a person. He later divided this list into three categories of traits (hierarchies), cardinal, central, and secondary. Cardinal traits are rare, which dominate and shape an individual’s behavior. Adolf Hitler is one of the rare individuals who fit the category of cardinal traits due to his ruthless behavior towards people, especially the Jews. The next hierarchy is central traits, which are general characteristic and the basic building blocks that form our behaviors. Lastly, the secondary traits hierarchy, are only prevalent under certain circumstances. These traits explain why a person feels or behaves a certain way at a certain

time.
It was Allport’s hypothesis that there are internal and external forces that will influence an individual's behavior and personality. He called these forces genotypes and phenotypes. Genotypes are the internal forces that control how a person takes in information and uses it to interact with the environment. Hitler was not a good student, but he was able to take in leadership skills from his father, who he did not like. Phenotypes are the external forces that control how a person would accept their environment and how that or other individuals would effect their behavior. Allport would examine how Adolf did not accept the Jewish population, influencing his behavior to be catastrophic. Allport came up with the idea of functional autonomy; the idea that drives can become independent of the original motives for a given behavior, likely seen in Adolf’s dictatorship personality. By applying Allport’s ideas, Adolf Hitler’s ruthlessness is brought to our attention as an example of how internal and external forces influenced his personality traits to motivate him as an individual.
Before examining Adolf’s motives, we can start to piece together the traits and personality of the individual he would later become. When Adolf was a child, he had a resistant and controlling attitude. One can see how these attitudes carried on into his future. As mentioned before, Allport created a list of personality traits, one that define a healthy, mature, functioning, well-rounded human being (Cloninger, 2008, p. 203-204). However, when Hitler is compared to these traits, he would not fall under this category.
The first of six personality qualities of a mature adult is the extension of the sense of self. This quality is how an individual involves themselves in many aspects of life and succeeds at them as well. An example of this would be an individual involving themselves in exercise groups, clubs at school, work, or community service. The individual doing so would not be involved because of self-centered state of mind, but rather they are doing so in order to learn and achieve better qualities and skills as a human. However, Adolf Hitler would not be seen doing this. He hated school growing up, failing a lot of the time that he attended. Rather than cultivating himself more, he decided to devote himself as leader to the Nazi regime and sought to rid the Jewish population completely.
The second quality, according to Allport, is warm interaction.

Hitler, which many could tell a person right off the bat, definitely did not subject under this category. Starting in his childhood, Adolf Hitler was seen as cold, cruel, and lacking emotion and sensitivity towards others. In his childhood there was a certain story where a landlady kicked out her husband for the night, the man pleaded with Hitler to intercede for him. However, Hitler refused and the man was forced to spend the night sleeping out on the street. The way he told the story later in his life showed him in an unpleasant light where he was malicious, cruel, and happy over another’s misery (Payne, 1973, p.

39).
Among Allport’s list of mature human beings, the third quality is emotional security. Emotional security is an individual’s high self-esteem and their ability to accept who they are as well as their personality with a sense of ease. This type of individual would not want to change them. They would feel very proud of who they are as a person. For Adolf Hitler, this was the case. Unsurprisingly, he did not have any trouble with accepting who he was. Adolf had a certain pride in him as a leader and in his German heritage, primarily seen through his dictatorship of Germany and his plan to destroy the Jewish population. This may have been driven from an inner force such as his anger towards his childhood and his insensitivity to humans.
Another characteristic of a healthy and functioning human being is by having a realistic perception, skills and assignments. This quality aims at a person being able to have a realistic perception of the environment and world they live in. It was not realistic for Hitler to want to kill a whole population of people in the world. Disgustingly enough, he was successful at killing millions, but the rest of the world found his wrong doings and put a stop to the barbaric acts. This type of quality in a person is understanding that good things can happen to them, but also understand that when bad happens, that is how life goes. Hitler was not like this, starting in his childhood. If Adolf wanted something to happen, Adolf would make sure that it did happen. When he had a vision for the future, no matter how unrealistic, he would do whatever he could to make it a reality. One could say that it could be the same as boyhood stubbornness instead of a mature man thinking (Stein, 1968, p. 146).
A fifth characteristic of Allport’s personality theory is to see self-objectification. Self-objectification is to have insight into one self and to be able to view one self as others might. This kind of quality is the type where one can poke fun at oneself in an awkward or embarrassing situation. For Adolph Hitler, however, he could not do so. He could only view himself in a serious light. He viewed himself as a leader most days, envisioning how he could have control over the German people. Adolf was so focused on the idea that Germany was the greatest nation ever that he could not see himself in a humorous light because at that point he was too far into his personality. He would likely be able to view himself, as the leader of the German people, as the climax to their hope and faith. He would say he would be the leader to take the German people away from their struggles in life, especially by eliminating the Jews. Nevertheless, he did not see himself as the rest of the world viewed him, which was ruthless and inhumane, especially to the Jews, who would call him more than a monster.
The last trait of Allport’s list of mature human characteristics is unifying philosophy of life. To be able to do so would mean that the person has a set of values that give order to their daily life. Most of the time this has to do with a religion and the morals that align with this religion, whether it be Christianity, Judaism, or Buddhism. Adolf Hitler did have a set of beliefs. He did not have morals that shaped his life nor a form of faith that was acceptable. Rather than applying religion to his life, he used it more as a tool to get others to follow him. On one hand, saying he will destroy Christianity and the Jews, while also using God in his speeches to declare that his mission was given to him from God (Duke, 2008). In this way, his philosophy was neither unifying nor coherent in his life and to the people around him.
After taking a look Allport’s theory of what a good, mature and autonomous human being looks like, and how Hitler’s qualities apply to them, Adolf Hitler does not match up to his theory. Allport would have said that Adolf Hitler was an unpleasant, not fully formed and lacking as a human being. On the surface, at the time, he may have seemed empowering to the German people, even other leaders in the world before they knew what was going on. However, beneath the surface, it is clear as to why Adolf Hitler showed qualities of a ruthless human through his central and secondary traits as well as his motivations and lack of meeting Allport’s qualities of a mature and healthy human being.