Theories of Personality
Kelly
Chapter 18
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© 2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved
Outline
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Overview of Personal Construct Theory
Biography of George Kelly
Kelly’s Philosophical Position
Personal Constructs
Applications of Personal Construct Theory
Related Research
Critique of Kelly
Concept of Humanity
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Overview of Personal
Construct Theory
• Called a Metatheory
• People Anticipate Events by the Meanings
or Interpretations They Place on Those
Events
• Behavior Is Shaped by Interpretation or
Construction of the World
• Every Construction Is Open to Revision or
Replacement
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Biography of Kelly
• Born in Perth, Kansas in 1905
• Was the only child to an ordained
Presbyterian minister
• Earned a bachelor’s degree in Physics and
Mathematics
• Earned his PhD in Psychology in 1931 (in 1
year!) from the State University of Iowa
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Biography (cont’d)
• Soon after his PhD, he became a psychotherapist
• During WWII, he became an aviation psychologist
for the Navy
• After the war, he joined the faculty at Ohio State
University (with Rotter) as Professor and Director
of the Psychological Clinic
• Published The Psychology of Personal Constructs
in 1955
• Died in 1967
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Kelly’s Philosophical Position
• Person as Scientist
– Like scientists, people ask questions, formulate hypotheses, test
them, draw conclusions, and try to predict future events
• Scientist as Person
– Scientists can also be seen as people and their pronouncements
should be regarded with same skepticism
• Constructive Alternativism
– All of our present interpretations of the universe are subject to
revision or replacement
– The piece-by-piece accumulation of facts does not add up to truth;
rather, facts can be looked at from different perspectives
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Personal Constructs
• Basic Postulate
– “A person’s processes are psychologically
channelized by the ways in which [that person]
anticipates events” (Kelly, 1955)
• Supporting Corollaries
– Kelly proposed 11 supporting corollaries, all of
which can be inferred from his basic postulate
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Personal Constructs
• Supporting Corollaries
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Similarities among events
Differences among people
Relationships among constructs
Dichotomy of constructs
Choice between dichotomies
Range of convenience
Experience and learning
Adaptation to experience
Incompatible constructs
Similarities among people
Social processes
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Applications of Personal
Construct Theory
• Abnormal Development
– Unhealthy people cling to outdated personal constructs
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Threat
Fear
Anxiety
Guilt
• Psychotherapy
– Fixed-role Therapy
• The Role Construct Repertory (Rep) Test
– To discover ways people construe significant people
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Related Research
• Gender as a Personal Construct
– Harper & Schoeman (2003)
• Gender was a basic category for many participants
• People who used gender most were more likely to apply gender
stereotypes to strangers
• Smoking and Self Concept
– Weiss, Watson, & McGuire (2003)
• Smokers identified more with their descriptions of smoker personality
than nonsmokers did for non-smoker personalities
• Personal Constructs and the Big Five
– James Grice (2004), Grice et al. (2009)
• The Big Five and Kelly’s Repertory Grid only overlap in what they
measure by about 50%
• Big Five framework provides common descriptors facilitating much
research, while Kelly’s theory is better with individual differences
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Critique of Kelly
• Kelly’s Theory Is:
– High on Parsimony
– Moderate on Internal Consistency and
Generating Research
– Low on Organizing Knowledge,
Falsifiability, and Guiding Action
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Concept of Humanity
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Optimism over Pessimism
Free Choice over Determinism
Teleology over Causality
Conscious over Unconscious
Social Factors over Biology
Uniqueness over Similarity
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