Biography

• Born: April 28, 1905, Perth, Kansas

• Death: March 6, 1967

• Career: He received a bachelor’s degree in physics and math, and a master’s in sociology. Then he received a bachelor of education degree in psychology and he received his PhD in psychology

• During the depression, he worked at Fort Hays Kansas State College, where he developed his theory and clinical techniques. During World War II, Kelly served as an aviation psychologist with the Navy, followed by a stint at the University of Maryland.

• In 1946, he left for Ohio State University, the year after Carl Rogers left, and became the director of his clinical program. He worked with Julian Rotter. It was here that his theory matured, where he wrote his two-volume work, The Psychology of Personal Constructs. In 1965, he began a research position at Brandeis University, where Maslow was working.

Personal Construct Theory

• Human as Scientist

  • In an effort to understand the world, we develop personal constructs that serve as hypothesis that make the world meaningful to us

  • Construct: your constructs represent the view you have constructed about the world as you experienced it. On the other hand, your constructs indicate how you are likely to construe the world as you continue to experience it.

• Kelly’s basic building block of personality

• Defined: A bipolar cognitive structure that an individual uses to interpret and make predictions about the world

  • Moral-amoral, masculine-feminine, attractive-ugly, funny-boring

Basic Concepts

• Constructs - ways of construing events/”seeing the world” so that the future is anticipated; templates we use to interpret people, events, etc.

  • Construction System: organization of many constructs (the personality), compilation of all of our constructs

    • Superordinate: the more important constructs, those that are on top of the construction system; your primary constructs

    • Subordinate: less important constructs, those that are at the bottom; alternative constructs

Properties of Constructs

• Range of Convenience

  • All of the events to which the construct is applicable

    • Ex. having a same construct for a father, teacher, or mentor

• Range of Focus

  • Events within the range of convenience to which a construct is most readily applied

    • Ex. The construct is more applied to father than teacher or mentor, although it can be applied to all.

• Permeability

  • Open to construing new events; construct can easily be modified

    • Impermeability: closed to the interpretation of new experiences; cannot be easily modified

• Commonality

  • Sharing of constructs by 2 or more people whose experience are similar

• Individuality

  • Differences among construction system in terms of content and organization; individuals can have some similar constructs but never the same construction system

Type of Constructs

• According to Permeability

  • Preemptive: very closed construct (pigeon whole construct)

    • Tight: high predictability

    • Loose: low predictability

  • Constellatory: stereotype thinking; once an event is subsumed under one construct, its other characteristics are fixed; string of stereotypes

    • Ex. Policeman is lazy. If he is lazy, then he is corrupt. If he is corrupt then he is dishonest.

  • Propositional Construct: open to new experiences

• According to Range of Convenience

  • Comprehensive: wide spectrum of events; applicable to many events

  • Incidental: narrow spectrum; limited application

• According to Focus

  • Core: governs a person’s basic functioning

  • Peripheral: may be altered without serious modification

Assumption

• Fundamental Postulate

  • How people predict or anticipates future events determine their behavior

• Constructive Alternativism

  • All of our present interpretations of the universe are subject to revision or replacement; all humans are sciences – their conclusions are subject to change

• Change

  • Why do some people have very impermeable constructs? Because they do not want change. Change brings anxiety, fear, and threat to the person so they would rather maintain their old constructs than to adjust them

Kelly and Psychopathology

• Kelly believed that people are strongly motivated to reduce or avoid both anxiety and threat

• Anxiety: the experience that one’s construct system is not applicable to events (the persons can’t understand or predict)

• Threat: the cognition that imminent comprehensive change is needed in a construct system

CPC Cycle: Process of Understanding a Person, Object, or Event

• Circumspection Phase: person considers several constructs to use in interpreting a situation

• Preemptive Phase: person reduces the number of alternative constructs to be used

• Control or Choice Phase: person decides what construct to use then plan a course of action

Cognitive Complexity

• Cognitively Complex Person (healthy personality)

  • Has a construction system containing constructs that are clearly differentiated

  • Can draw sharp distinctions between self and others

  • Has skill in predicting the behavior of others

  • Constructs are very permeable

• Cognitively Simple Person (unhealthy personality)

  • Has a construction system in which the distinction among constructs is blurred

  • Has difficulty seeing distinction between self and others

  • Lacks skills in predicting the behavior of others

  • Views others in terms of few categories

11 Corollaries

• Construction

  • A person anticipates events by construing their replications

  • We anticipate by interpreting

• Experience

  • A person’s construction system varies as he successively construes the replication of events

  • We reconstruct in the light of experience

• Dichotomy

  • A person’s construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs

  • We make bipolar constructs (Self and selfish)

• Organization

  • Each person characteristically evolves, for his convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs

  • We developed an organized, hierarchical system of constructs

• Range

  • A construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only

  • Each construct has a certain focus and is not useful for everything

• Modulation

  • The variation in a person’s construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within the range of convenience the variants lie

  • Some constructs we develop are flexible to open experience; others are not

• Choice

  • A person chooses for himself an alternative in a dichotomized construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system

  • We are free and able to choose among alternative of the construct

• Individuality

  • Persons differ from each other in their construction of events

  • No 2 people interpret events in the same way

• Commonality

  • To the extent that one person employ a variety of construction subsystems, which are inferentially incompatible with each other

  • We may be inconsistent within ourselves

• Sociality

  • To the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person

  • Social interactions entail understanding other constructs