Kelly’s Philosophical Position

 Is human behavior based on reality (real world) or on people’s perception of reality? George
Kelly would say both.
 He rejected Radical Behaviorism and extreme phenomenology
 People have Personal Construct, or way of interpreting and explaining events, hold the
key to predicting behaviors.
 Personal construct is like a personal’s individual/personal theory of how the world works.
o Which is based on his/her prior experiences

Person as Scientist

 Whenever we decide to do something, we act like a scientist.

 That is, you ask questions, formulate hypotheses, test them, draw conclusions, and try to predict
future.
o When a person confess a feelings to a person.
 A person’s conclusions, like those of any scientist, are not fixed or final.
 Kelly was hopeful that people individually and collectively will find better ways of restructuring
their lives through imagination and foresight.

Scientist as Person

 The pronouncements of scientists should be regarded with the same skepticism with which we
view any behavior.
 Every scientific observation can be looked at from a different perspective.

Constructive Alternativism

 There is an objective reality but there are also subjective people experiencing it.
 All subjective realities are based on objective reality.
 Fact and events do not dictate conclusion rather, they carry meanings for us to discover
 We are all constantly faced with alternatives, which we can explore if we choose, but in any
case, we must assume responsibility for how we construe our worlds.

Personal Constructs

 Kelly’s philosophy assumes that people’s interpretation of a unified, ever-changing world

constitutes their reality.
 All people continually create their own view of the world.
 Some people are quite inflexible and seldom change their way of seeing things. They cling to
their view of reality even as the real world changes.
 Some people construe a world that is substantially different from the world of other people.
 Kelly (1963) would insist that these people, along with everyone else, are looking at their world
through “transparent patterns or templates” that they have created in order to cope with the
world’s realities.
 these patterns are called personal constructs
 Basic Postulate

 The basic postulate assumes that “a person’s processes are psychologically channelized By
the ways in which [that person] anticipates events” (Kelly, 1955, p. 46).
o Channelized - People are already in movement; they merely channelize or direct
their processes toward some end or purpose.
o Ways of anticipating events, which suggests that people guide their actions
according to their predictions of the future.
 Neither the past nor the future per se determines our behavior. Rather, our
present view of the future shapes our actions.

Supporting Corollaries

 Construction corollary - Similarities Among Events

o No two events are exactly alike, yet we construe similar events so that they are
perceived as being the same.
o The construction corollary states that “a person anticipates events by construing
their replications” (Kelly, 1955, p. 50).
 Individuality corollary - Differences Among People
o “Persons differ from each other in their construction of events”
o Because people have different reservoirs of experiences, they construe the same
event in different ways.
 Organization Corollary - Relationships Among Constructs
o People “characteristically evolve, for [their] convenience in anticipating events, a
construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs” (Kelly,
1955, p. 56).
o The organization corollary also assumes an ordinal relationship of constructs so that
one construct may be subsumed under another.
 Dichotomy Corollary - Dichotomy of Constructs
o Kelly insisted that a construct is an either-or proposition—black or white, with no
shades of gray
o In order to form a construct, people must be able to see similarities between
events, but they must also contrast those events with their opposite pole.
 Without contrast, we cannot perceive properly
o By contrasting intelligence with stupidity and independence with dependence, you
see how they are alike and how they can be organized under the construct “good”
as opposed to “bad.”
 Choice Corollary - Choice Between Dichotomies
o People choose for themselves that alternative in a dichotomized construct through
which they anticipate the greater possibility for extension and definition of future
constructs.
 Range Corollary - Range of Convenience
o Kelly’s range corollary assumes that personal constructs are finite and not relevant
to everything. It only applies to some things in our life
 o The construct independence was within Arlene’s range of convenience when she
was deciding to buy a car, but on other occasions independence would be outside
those boundaries.
 Experience Corollary - Experience and Learning
o “A person’s construction system varies as he [or she] successively construes the
replications of events”
o Experience consists of the successive construing of events. The events themselves
do not constitute experience—it is the meaning we attach to them that changes our
lives.
 Modulation Corollary - Adaptation to Experience
o “The variation in a person’s construction system is limited by the permeability of the
constructs within whose range of convenience the variants lie”
o It assumes that the extent to which people revise their constructs is related to the
degree of permeability of their existing constructs.
 People who have constructs that are set in stone are hard to permeate but
clay- like constructs are easy to mold.
 Fragmentation Corollary - Incompatible Constructs
o “A person may successively employ a variety of constructive subsystems which are
inferentially incompatible with each other”
o At first it may seem as if personal constructs must be compatible, but if we look to
our own behavior and thinking, we can easily see some inconsistencies.
o We pointed out that Walter Mischel (a student of Kelly) believed that behavior is
usually more inconsistent than trait theorists would have us believe.
 Commonality Corollary - Similarities Among People
o “To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is
similar to that employed by another, [that person’s] processes are psychologically
similar to those of the other person”
o Two people need not experience the same event or even similar events for their
processes to be psychologically similar; they must merely construe their experiences
in a similar fashion.
 Sociality Corollary - Social Processes
o To the extent that people accurately construe the belief system of others, they may
play a role in a social process involving those other people.
o In interpersonal relations, they not only observe the behavior of the other person;
they also interpret what that behavior means to that person.
o Kelly was simply suggesting that people are actively involved in interpersonal
relations and realize that they are part of the other person’s construction system.
 Role refers to a pattern of behavior that results from a person’s
understanding of the constructs of others with whom that person is
engaged in a task.
 For example, when Arlene was negotiating with the used-car dealer, she
construed her role as that of a potential buyer because she understood that
that was his expectation of her
Related Research

Gender as a Personal Construct

 Gender is perhaps one of the most fundamental and universal schemas in person perception,
not all people are equal in the extent to which they organize their beliefs and attitudes about
others around gender.
 “Gender thus becomes a primary means of resolving social ambiguity”
 “A person with whom they worked, and “the most successful person known personally.”

Applying Personal Construct Theory to Intra-Personal Questions of Identity

 Kelly’s original Rep test was designed to assess how individuals construe significant people in
their lives. In this way, it serves as a test of interpersonal comparisons that reveal meaningful
personal constructs, like gender in the previous section.
 This research uses the Rep test to examine intra-personal questions of identity within
individuals.
 Understanding Internalized Prejudice Through Personal Construct Theory Perhaps the most
insidious characteristic
o Understanding Internalized Prejudice Through Personal Construct Theory Perhaps the
most insidious characteristic
o Kelly’s concept of threat, the experience of people who perceive their basic personal
constructs to be unstable, may lead gays and lesbians to separate their homosexual
identity from their self in order to avoid frightening change in their self-construal.
o Kelly defined guilt as occurring when individuals perceive that core aspects within
themselves are incongruent with how they ought to be. Guilt, then, may lead gays and
lesbians to denigrate homosexual identity.
o

Personal Constructs and the Big Five

 Kelly’s personal constructs have a moderate amount of attention, but not to the same extent as
the Big Five model.
 The list of the Big Five traits was created by essentially boiling down all the thousands of ways
people describe one another into a shorter more manageable list that captured the most
common themes.
 Some of the unique aspects captured by the repertory grid were body type, ethnicity, wealth,
smoker status, and political affiliation

Concet of Humanity

 Optimistic
 Free choice over determinism
 Teological
 Conscious over unconscious
 Social influence over biology
 Uniqueness of personality