George Kelly (1905-1967)

Personal Construct Theory

Theory

• Personal Construct Theory or Constructivism:• People construe or understand the world and

construct own versions of reality-personal system of explaining human behaviors.

• Each of us tries to understand the world and we do so in ways that are different

• A person’s processes are psychologically channeled by ways in which he/she anticipates events

Personality development

• Development revolves about the person's attempts to maximize understanding of the world through the continuing definition and elaboration of his or her construct system.

Personal construct:•The pattern of an individual’s construction are called constructs Each person sets up his/hers own network of pathways leading into the future.Constructive Alternativism - basic assumption that human beings are capable of changing their interpretations of events

• A construct is defined not as an event, but how we construe the event. Thus a construct is the meaning we give to our surrounding reality.

• •We create an image of reality and then we respond to this image.

• •Personal constructs are then tested against reality.• • Personal constructs are cognitive structures we use

to interpret &predict events

Metaphor of Man-as-scientist

•Anticipation –we are always trying to anticipate /foresee what will happen• The construct, when tested, anticipates the right

outcome the hypothesis • personal theory or construct system tells us about

surrounding phenomena.

Kinds of Constructs

– superordinate - construct that controls many other constructs.– subordinate - construct that is controlled by other constructs. – core - fundamental belief that is part of the individual’s

personal identity– peripheral - belief that is relatively unimportant to the person

and that can be changed rather easily. – preemptive - construct that includes only its own elements and

maintains that these elements cannot apply to other constructs.– constellatory - construct that allows its elements to belong to

other constructs concurrently; however, once identified in a particular way, these elements are fixed.

– propositional - construct that leaves all of its elements open to modification.

• No 2 people use identical personal constructs, & no 2 people organize their constructs in an identical manner.

•According to Kelly, personal constructs are bipolar.• We classify relevant objects in an either/or fashion with each construct.•E.g., friendly-unfriendly, tall-short, intelligent-stupid, masculine- feminine, etc.

• Kelly argued that differences in our behavior largely result from differences in the way people “construe the world.”

• Suppose two people meet a new individual named Adam.• • Person 1• : uses friendly-unfriendly, fun loving-stuffy, and outgoing-shy

constructs in forming his template for Adam’s behavior.• Person 2• : uses refined-gross, sensitive-insensitive, & intelligent-stupid

constructs.• •After both individuals interact with Adam they walk away with

differentimpressions of Adam.• •Person 1 believes that Adam is a friendly, fun-loving &

outgoing person,whereas Person 2 thinks that Adam is gross, insensitive, & stupid.

• •The same situation is interpreted differently.• Past experience—guides our predictions

• The theory is set out in his major work as a series of formal postulates and corollaries,

• Its essence is that personal identity is defined by the way we construe or “understand” our personal worlds.

• It is therefore a phenomenological approach, rather than a positivist one.

• This basically means trying things out to see whether they work:

• our “constructs” or ways of making sense of the world, are not necessarily conscious and articulate, but may be inferred from behaviour.

• Kelly does not refer to learning at all, but to changes in constructs over time

• Its major tool is the “Repertory Grid”, which is an amazingly simple idiographic device to explore how people experience their world.

• It is a table in which, apart from the outer two columns, the other columns are headed by the names of objects or people(traditionally up to 21 of them).

• These names are also written on cards, which the tester shows to the subject in groups of three, always asking the same question:

• “How are two of these similar and the third one different?”

• Constructs do not have to be dictionary opposites: • for a given subject “Unselfish” might be a more

meaningful opposite to “Mean”, than “Generous”. • It is connotations for an individual which count,

rather than "objective" dictionary denotations. • For this reason you need to exercise great caution in

comparing the grids of different people

Corollaries

• Corollaries - propositions associated with the fundamental postulate – construction - a person anticipates events by

assuming there is regularity between them.– individuality - proposition that people differ in

their constructions of reality.– organization - proposition that the individual’s

constructs are arranged in particular ways within his or her personal belief system.

– dichotomy - proposition that constructs are bipolar.

• The construction corollary• "A person anticipates events by construing their

replications" • The individuality corollary• "Persons differ from each other in their construction of

events" • The organization corollary• "Each person characteristically evolves for his convenience

in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs)

• The dichotomy corollary• "A person's construction system is composed of a finite

number of dichotomous constructs"

• The range corollary• "A construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range

of events only“• The experience corollary• "A person's construction system varies as he successively

construes the replication of events“• The modulation corollary• "The variation in a person's construction system is limited by the

permeability of the constructs within whose ranges of convenience the variants lie"

• The fragmentation corollary• "A person may successively employ a variety of construction

subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other

Cogntive Therapy

• Role Construct Repertory Test (Rep Test) - test designed to Measure the personal construct systems of individuals.

• Clients Use Invalid Constructs; therapists must assist clients' growth by employing the technique of controlled elaboration - technique in which clients are encouraged to clarify and think through their problems in consultation with the therapist;

• this process enables them to revise or discard old constructs and to formulate new and more effective ones.

• Fixed-Role Therapy - procedure designed to produce personality changes in clients by constructing roles for them that help them overcome their weaknesses and enable them to reconstrue themselves and their life situations.

• Fixed-Role Therapy (cont.)– self-characterization sketch - initial step in fixed-

role therapy, in which clients are asked to write a brief character outline of themselves as it might be written by an intimate and sympathetic friend.

– enactment sketch - client is asked to play a role designed to contrast sharply with the client’s current self-perception, as revealed in the self-characterization sketch, and thus to produce major changes in the client.

• Comprehensiveness - limited in scope.• Precision and Testability - precise and testable.• Parsimony - fails to meet the parsimony criterion; too

simplistic.• Empirical Validity - empirical support is strong for

some aspects of the theory.• Heuristic Value - theory is proving to be stimulating

to researchers in Great Britain.• Applied Value - considerable influence on business

managers and occupational counselors. Applied value of the theory is steadily increasing.