George Kelly (psychologist) - Personal Construct Psychology

Personal Construct Psychology

Kelly's fundamental view of personality was that people are like naive scientists who see the world through a particular lens, based on their uniquely organized system of construction, which they use to anticipate events. But because people are naive scientists, they sometimes employ systems for construing the world that are distorted by idiosyncratic experiences not applicable to their current social situation. A system of construction that chronically fails to characterize and/or predict events, and is not appropriately revised to comprehend and predict one's changing social world, is considered to underlie psychopathology (or mental illness.)

The body of Kelly's work, The Psychology of Personal Constructs, Volume I and II was written in 1955 when Kelly was a professor at Ohio State University. The first three chapters of the book were republished by W. W. Norton in paperback in 1963 and consist only of his theory of personality which is mentioned in most personality books. The re-publication omitted Kelly's assessment technique, the Rep Grid Test, and his theory of psychotherapy, (Fixed role Therapy) which is rarely practiced in the form he proposed.

On the other hand, Kelly's fundamental view of people as naive scientists was incorporated into most later-developed forms of cognitive-behavioral therapy that blossomed in the late 70s and early 80s and even, surprisingly, into Intersubjective psychoanalysis. Kelly's personality theory was distinguished at the time he published the two volumes from drive theories (such as psychodynamic models) on the one hand, and behavioral theories on the other, in that people were not seen as solely motivated by instincts (such as sexual and aggressive drives) or learning history but by their need to characterize and predict events in their social world. Because the constructs people developed for that purpose were always changeable, Kelly's theory of personality is less deterministic that drive theory or learning theory. People could change their view of the world and in so doing change the way they interacted with it, felt about it, and even others' reactions to them. For this reason, it is an existential theory, regarding humankind as having a choice to reconsture themselves, a concept Kelly referred to as "Constructive Alternativism."

Constructs are bipolar categories, the way two things are alike and different from a third, that people employ to understand the world. Examples of such constructs are "attractive," "intelligent," "kind." A construct always implies contrast. So when an individual categorizes others as attractive, or intelligent, or kind, an opposite polarity is implied. This means that such a person may also evaluate the others in terms of the constructs "ugly," "stupid," or "cruel." The importance of a particular construct varies among individuals. The adaptiveness of a construct system is measured by how well it applies to the situation at hand and is useful in predicting events. All constructs are not used in every situation because they have a limited range (range of convenience). Adaptive people are continually revising and updating their own constructs to match new information (or data) that they encounter in their experience.

Kelly's is the only personality theory ever laid out as a testable scientific treatise with a fundamental postulate and a set of corollaries.

Fundamental postulate: "A person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events."

• The construction corollary: "a person anticipates events by construing their replications." This means that individuals anticipate events in their social world by perceiving a similarity with a past event (construing a replication).

• The experience corollary: "a person's construction system varies as he successively construes the replication of events."

• The dichotomy corollary: "a person's construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs."

• The organization corollary: "each person characteristically evolves, for his convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs."

• The range corollary: "a construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only."

• The modulation corollary: "the variation in a person's construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within whose range of convenience the variants lie."

• The choice corollary: "a person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system."

• The individuality corollary: "persons differ from each other in their construction of events."

• The commonality corollary: "to the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, his psychological processes are similar to the other person."

• The fragmentation corollary: "a person may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other."

• The sociality corollary: "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."

Disordered constructs are those in which the system of construction is not useful in predicting social events and fails to change to accommodate new information. In many ways, Kelly's of psychopathology is similar to the elements that define a poor theory. A disordered construct system does not accommodate new data.

Dimensions of Transitions

Anxiety, hostility, and guilt had unique definitions and meanings in Personal Construct Theory (Vol 1 486-534). Anxiety developed when a person encountered a situation that his or her construct system did not cover, an event unlike any he or she had encountered. An example of such a situation is a woman from the western United States who is accustomed to earthquakes, who moves to the eastern United States and experiences great anxiety because of a hurricane. While the an earthquake might be of greater magnitude, she experiences greater anxiety with the hurricane because she has no constructs to deal with such an event. She is caught "with her constructs down." Similarly, a boy who has been abused in early childhood may not have the constructs to accommodate kindness from others. Such a boy might experience anxiety in outstretched hand that others view as benevolent.

Guilt- Guilt is dislodgment from one's core constructs. This means that an individual feels guilt if he or she feels fails to confirm the constructs that define him or her. This definition of guilt is radically different than in other theories of personality. Kelly used the example of the man who regards others as cow-like creatures "making money and giving milk." Such a man might construe his role in relationship to others in terms of his ability to con favors or money from them. Such a man, who other psychologists might call a ruthless psychopath, and see as unable to experience guilt, feels guilt in Kelly's theory when he is unable to con others and is therefore alienated from his core constructs.

Hostility - Hostility is "attempting to extort confirmation of a social prediction that is already failing." When a person encounters a situation in which s/he expects one outcome and receives quite a different one, s/he should change his/her theory or constructs rather than trying to change the situation to match his/her constructs. But the person who continually refuses to modify his or her belief system to accommodate new data, and in fact tries to change the data is acting in bad faith and with hostility. Hostility, in Kelly's theory, is analogous to a scientist "fudging" his or her data. An example might be a professor who sees himself as a brilliant educator who deals with poor student reviews by devaluing the students or the means of evaluation.