Chapter 15
The Cognitive Approach:
Theory and Application
George Kelly (1905-1967)
 Was born in a farming community near Wichita, Kansas
 Was an active and accomplished member of his college
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debate team
Described his first psychology course as boring and
unconvincing
Received his bachelor’s degree in physics and
mathematics from Park College
Studied educational sociology at the University of Kansas
and education at the University of Edinburgh
Received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of
Iowa
Subsequently taught at Fort Hays Kansas State College,
the University of Maryland, Ohio State University, and
Brandeis University
Kelly’s personal construct theory
 Kelly’s theory adopted a man-the-scientist perspective.
 He argued that we have a strong need to understand the world as well
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as possible in order to predict and control the events we experience.
He said that our ideas about the world can be compared to transparent
templates that we “place over” the new events we encounter.
We seek to develop and constantly refine our view of the world and
everything in it, changing our mental templates based on how well or
how poorly they have enabled us to predict events in the past.
He used the term personal constructs to refer to the cognitive
structures that we use to interpret and predict events.
He argued that each person’s system of personal constructs is different
from that of every other person.
Example of hierarchically ordered constructs
Animals ― Plants
Flowers ― Grasses ― Trees
Deciduous ― Conifers
Christmas trees ― Other conifers
Example of hierarchically ordered constructs
Management ― Floor staff
Cashiers ― Salespersons
Naive ― Sophisticated
Patient ― Impatient
Basic assumptions of George Kelly’s personal
construct theory
 Fundamental postulate: A person’s processes are psychologically
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channelized by the way in which s/he anticipates events.
Individuality corollary: Persons differ from each other in their
construction of events.
Dichotomy corollary: A person’s construction system is composed of a
finite number of dichotomous constructs.
Range corollary: A construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite
range of events only.
Commonality corollary: To the extent that one person constructs
experience in a way that is similar to another, her/his psychological
processes are similar to those of the other person.
Sociality corollary: To the extent that one person construes the
construction processes of another, s/he may be able to understand and
effectively deal with the other person.
Kelly’s view of psychological problems
 Kelly rejected the idea that most psychological disorders are caused by
past traumatic experiences.
 He argued instead that they are attributable primarily to inadequate or
faulty personal construct systems.
 He believed that anxiety is at the heart of most psychological
problems, and that it occurs when we feel that we are unable to
adequately interpret, predict, or control events.
 Why do our personal construct systems sometimes fail us? Kelly
suggested the following reasons:
– Sometimes our personal construct systems are too small or are incomplete.
– Sometimes our personal construct systems become impermeable.
– Sometimes our personal construct systems are inadequate because of a
lack of experience.
Mischel’s cognitive personality variables
 Walter Mischel, a vocal critic of the trait
approach to personality, has instead
proposed that a complex system of
cognitive-affective units determine our
behavior.
 His approach is a more complicated
extension of the kind of cognitive social
learning models proposed by Julian Rotter
and Albert Bandura.
 Instead of traits, Mischel explains behavior
in terms of encodings, expectations and
beliefs, affects, goals and values, and
competencies and self-regulatory plans.
Cognitive-affective units in Mischel’s
personality system
 Encodings: Categories (constructs) for encoding information
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about one’s self, other people, events, and situations
Expectations and beliefs: Expectations about what will happen
in certain situations, about outcomes for certain behaviors, and
about one’s personal efficacy
Affect: Feelings, emotions, and emotional responses
Goals and values: Individual goals, values, and life projects
Competencies and self-regulatory plans: Perceived abilities,
plans, and strategies for changing and maintaining one’s
behavior and internal states.
Cognitive structures: schemas
 Schemas are hypothetical cognitive structures that help us
perceive, organize, process, and use information.
 Schemas organize and stabilize our perception of the world,
helping to make it more interpretable and predictable in the
ways that George Kelly emphasized.
 Over time, and with continued use, schemas operate with
increasingly greater efficiency, to the point that they become
automatic and “transparent.”
 As with other cognitive structures, we can use schemas to help
explain personality differences, because they result in relatively
stable individual differences in behavior.
Cognitive structures: prototypes are
schemas about other people
 Prototypes are hypothetical cognitive structures that help us
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perceive, organize, process, and use information by providing us
with a central representative example of a particular category.
Prototypes are usually organized hierarchically, with more
specific prototypes subsumed under more general ones.
For example, the general athlete prototype brings to mind a
person who has good physical conditioning, excellent
coordination, and a quick reaction time.
That general prototype is fairly abstract, however, in
comparison to the more specific prototypes of a WWW wrestler,
an NBA basketball player, a female Olympic gymnast, and a
jockey.
The prototype we apply to a given person is important because it
can play a large role in how we view and react to that person.
Cognitive structures: self-schemas
 Self-schemas are cognitive generalizations about the self, derived from
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past experience, that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant
information.
Because each part of your life is not equally important, not everything
you do becomes part of a self-schema.
Differences in self-schemas give rise to corresponding differences in
behavior (examples: elementary school children with a prosocial selfschema, women with a successful dieter self-schema, women whose
self-schemas included sexuality, Latino Americans with a sympatico
self-schema).
Self-schemas can facilitate response times in judging schema-relevant
words as self-descriptive, as in the widely cited study by Markus
(1977).
Information processed through the self-schema should be easier to
remember than information processed through other types of schemas
(Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977).
Mean number of words recalled as a function of the
cue question (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977)
3.5
3
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
Big letters?
Rhymes
with?
Means
same as?
Describes
you?
Cognitive structures: possible selves
 Possible selves are cognitive representations of imagined future
selves.
 Possible selves can be positive (for example, homeowner or
happily married). However, they can also be negative and take
the form of feared selves (for example, homeless person or
divorced person).
 Possible selves serve two important functions:
– They help us interpret the meaning of our behavior and the
events in our lives.
– They provide incentives for future behavior.
 Developing appropriate possible selves is an important part of
adolescence. In one study, more than a third of juvenile
delinquents had already developed the possible self of criminal.
Higgins’self-discrepancy theory
 Higgins argued that we not only compare
our real self (actual self) to our ideal self,
but to our ought self as well.
 He proposed that we experience negative
emotion to the extent that our actual self
falls short of our ideal self or our ought
self.
 However, the first kind of discrepancy
should result in feelings of
disappointment or depression, whereas
the second kind of discrepancy should
result in feelings of nervousness, anxiety,
and guilt.
Application: Cognitive Psychotherapy
George Kelly’s approaches to cognitive
restructuring
 Help clients develop new constructs, re-shape their
construct hierarchies, and modify old constructs so that
they could better predict events.
 Use fixed-role therapy to help patients see the world
through different eyes. In this type of therapy, a team of
therapists creates an imaginary person for the client to roleplay. By practicing seeing the world the way this person
does, the clients can presumably modify their personal
construct systems so that they can more accurately
interpret and predict events.
Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Therapy
The A-B-Cs of Rational Emotive Therapy
 According to Ellis, most of the negative emotion we
experience is the self-generated product of faulty reasoning
and reliance on irrational beliefs. He describes this as an
A→ B → C process in which:
– A is the Activating experience
– B is the irrational Belief
– C is the emotional Consequence
 We often cannot control the activating experience.
However, by changing the irrational belief to a more
rational one, we can change the emotional consequence
from being negative to being either positive or neutral.
Examples of some common irrational beliefs
 Because I would like be competent and successful in everything I do, I
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must do that at all times.
Because I’m nice to other people and treat them with respect, everyone
I meet must be nice to me and treat me with respect.
Because I strongly desire a life that is comfortable and hassle-free, my
life must be like that all of the time.
Because I acknowledge my mistakes and apologize when I’m wrong,
every else must always do the same.
Because I work hard to look my best when I’m out in public, I must
always look good in public and cannot accept ever looking bad.
Because I love my partner and intensely desire to be loved in return,
my partner must express as much love for me as I do for my partner.
Self-instructional training
 Self-instructional training usually occurs in the context of a
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larger cognitive therapy program.
It is used to treat different types of self-defeating thinking.
Analogous to Rational Emotive Therapy, the goal of selfinstructional training is to replace self-defeating thoughts with
more appropriate positive ones.
Therapists using self-instructional training help their clients
prepare internal monologues to help them cope effectively with
each stage of a stressful experience.
Research evidence suggests that this and other forms of
cognitive restructuring therapy are actually more successful in
treating depression than are behavior therapy, drug treatments,
and, of course, no treatment.
Assessment: The Rep Test
 George Kelly developed the Role Construct Repertory Test (or Rep Test) as a
way of quickly assessing people’s personal construct systems.
 The Rep Test usually presents clients with a set of important “elements”
(usually people) in their worlds, and asks them to answer questions such as “In
what important way are two of these three (things, people, etc.) similar to each
other but different from the third?”
 The effectiveness of this technique in capturing essential features of the
client’s personal construct system relies on four assumptions:
– That the constructs the client provides are not limited to the specific elements being
evaluated, but also apply to new ones (and new situations).
– That the constructs have some degree of permanence.
– That the elements on the list are representative of the ones the client actually deals
with in his or her daily life.
– That clients are able to adequately describe the constructs they typically use.
Example of a Repertory Grid form
Strengths and criticisms of the cognitive
approach
 Strengths
– Many of its concepts and hypotheses evolved out of and were developed
through empirical research findings.
– It fits well with the current “cognitive Zeitgeist” in psychology
– It informs the various cognitive/behavioral therapy techniques that have
been developed in recent decades.
 Criticisms
– Some of its concepts are too abstract, and many are not clearly
distinguished from other such concepts.
– It’s not clear that we really need to introduce these concepts in order to
account for individual differences in behavior.
– There is presently no single integrated theory available to organize and
guide the research in this area.
– Basic questions about how various cognitive structures relate to each other
and how (or even if) they are embodied in brain processes have yet to be
answered.