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 outgoingshy constructs in forming his template for Adam’s behavior.
• Person 2
• : uses refined-gross, sensitive-insensitive, & intelligentstupid 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 fixedrole 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 selfcharacterization 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.