13 Facts About Elias Porter

Elias Porter's career included military, government, business and clinical settings.

Elias Porter completed his masters work in 1938 at the University of Oregon, which documented that learning occurs in rats in mazes, even without the presence of rewards, and that the learning could be accessed later in the presence of rewards.

Elias Porter's dissertation was the first of many studies to empirically document the effectiveness of the non-directive approach in counseling.

Elias Porter's earliest known psychometric evaluations were performed with Rogers, and they measured the degree of directiveness or non-directiveness of a counselor using client-centered techniques.

In 1971, Elias Porter abandoned LIFO and published the Strength Deployment Inventory, which modified Fromm's ideas and incorporated Elias Porter's original concepts.

Elias Porter took Fromm's Freudian frame of reference and modified it based on the principle that the primary drive is for self-worth, or self-actualization.

Elias Porter was the first known psychometrician to use colors as shortcuts to communicate the results of a personality test.

Elias Porter accepted Fromm's premise that strengths taken to excess become weaknesses.

Just as Rogers suggests that a person should have congruence between, their experience, awareness, and communication, Elias Porter suggests that a psychometric test should communicate to the user in such a way that it heightens the awareness of the life-experience of the test-taker and becomes useful to the test-taker regarding making behavioral choices.

Elias Porter suggested that personal filters influence perception; that people tend to use their own motivational values as a standard when evaluating the behavior of others and that the more different two people's motivational values are from each other, the more likely they would each be to perceive the behaviors of the others as overdone.

Elias Porter renamed it Personal Strengths Publishing and acted as president of the organization until his death in 1987 from oral cancer.

Elias Porter created and attempted to market several other commercial products including a stop smoking program and a residential real-estate purchasing decision system, none of which achieved commercial success.

Sara Maloney Elias Porter continued to manage the business until her retirement in 1995.