GEORGE KELLY - PERSONAL CONSTRUCT THEORY

Ms. Asila Golani

 History
• He was born in 1905 on a farm near Perth, Kansas.
• Kelly attended college at Friends University and then
Park College, where he received a Bachelor’s degree in
physics and mathematics.
• Despite studying math and science, the collegiate
debates he experienced had sparked a keen interest in
social problems. So, he entered the University of Kansas
to earn a Master’s degree in educational sociology, and
in 1927, he completed his thesis on the distribution of
leisure time activities of workers in Kansas City.
• His research and writings during this time focused on the
practical aspects of providing clinical psychological
services for schools. Much like Alfred Adler had in
Austria, he developed traveling clinics to provide training
around the state of Kansas, and his model had a
dramatic influence on the future of rural school
psychology.
Placing Kelly in Context: A Cognitive Theory of Personality

• Kelly’s personal construct theory represents the culmination of the shift from
animalistic behaviorism to humanistic cognition.
• In American psychology, behaviorism was a powerful force, and it began with the
very traditional approach of theorists such as John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner.
• Alongside the experimental behaviorists were the learning theorists, such as
Clark Hull. As Dollard and Miller tried to find some common ground between
psychodynamic theory and traditional learning approaches, they were inevitably
led to consider the role of social factors in human learning.
• Bandura, Rotter, and Mischel built on the legacy of Dollard and Miller, but added
to it the active role of cognition in the human species.
• Finally, Kelly moved to a purely cognitive description of how individuals become
who they are.
• Kelly is the recognized leader of a significant development in the field of
personality, a development that contributed to the highly regarded cognitive
therapies of Ellis and Beck.
 PERSONAL CONSTRUCT THEORY

• He proposes it is not simply enough to know what a person is

likely to do in a given situation, even when your predictions are
correct. More importantly, we need to know what a person
might have done (Kelly, 1966). Thus, unlike the cognitive social
learning theorists who consider cognitive processes as an aspect
of the environmental circumstances associated with behavior,
Kelly focused on the cognitive constructs first and foremost.
• Kelly believed that individuals act very much like scientists
studying personality: they create constructs, or expectations,
about the environment and people around them, and then they
behave in ways that “test” those beliefs and expectations.
• For Kelly, the personal constructs are more important than
actual reality, since it is the construct that guides cognition and
behavior, not the actual situation.
• Since Kelly proposes that each individual is theorizing about and
testing their own life circumstances, he suggests the term man-
the-scientist for understanding how all people (including, of
course, women) approach the world around them.
 Constructive Alternativism

• Kelly suggests that it is better to say that the world around us is existing, rather than to say it exists.

• Kelly emphasizes the creative capacity of living things to represent their environment, as opposed to
simply reacting to it. These representations are known as constructs, patterns that we create in our
mind and attempt to fit over the realities of the world. Since our constructs don’t always fit with
reality, we are constantly modifying them, as well as trying to increase our repertoire of constructs.
Over time, we test our constructs for the ability to predict what will happen in our lives.

• Kelly believes that all of our present interpretations of the environment are open to revision or
replacement; there are always alternative constructs that may help us deal with new or difficult
situations. It is this philosophical position that Kelly refers to as constructive alternativism. It is
important to keep in mind, of course, that not just any alternative will work in a given situation.
Therefore, each potential alternative construct must be evaluated in terms of its specific predictive
efficiency, as well as in terms of overall predictive efficiency of the system it would become part of, if
that alternative construct were adopted (Kelly, 1955a).

• According to Kelly, it is more important to know what a person might have done, and he believed that
people act as scientists, testing their constructs in order to become better at predicting and controlling
their lives.
Can you think of situations in which someone
did what you expected, but you really wanted
to know what they had thought about doing
as alternatives?
 Corollaries of personal construct theory
• The fundamental postulate is that we act in a way with how we expect the
situation to be based on past events. How we interpret and interact with the world
predicts how we behave in future scenarios and influences how we behave.

Example: If an individual perceives people as being nice and trustworthy based on

their interactions and perceptions with people then they are more likely to seek
social settings and be trusting. If an individual perceives people to be mean and
dishonest they are more likely to be antisocial and distrusting of others.

• The mind does not stop and start, simply reacting to stimuli, but rather it is
constantly in motion, constantly experimenting with constructs. The fundamental
postulate states that our psychological processes (personality is a continually
flowing, moving process) are directed by how we anticipate events.
 Cont.d
Kelly’s personal construct theory is presented in a scientific format, organized into a fundamental postulate
and 11 corollaries:
 Dimensions of Transition

• Since life is an ongoing process, there are regular transitions in

one’s personal constructs. According to the organizational and
modulation corollaries, individuals have certain preferences
amongst their constructs and differences in their ability to
reconstruct them. Problems in life arise when individuals find
it difficult to transition from an ineffective construct, one that
does not allow for predicting or controlling events, to an
effective construct.

• According to Kelly (1955a), the major problems are seen as

the psychological phenomena of threat, anxiety, guilt,
aggression and hostility.
 Cont.d
In each case, the psychological phenomenon is based on either the failure of one’s constructs to provide courses of action or a
direct challenge to the system of constructs available to the individual. Given that the individual’s personal construct systems
define the larger construct of self, these psychological phenomena represent a challenge to the very self experiencing them.

Emotional States:
Kelly retained but redefined several traditional psychological concepts of emotion in terms relevant to cognitive theory.

Threat:
It is the awareness of imminent comprehensive change in one’s core structures.
Anxiety:
It is thus, the vague feeling of apprehension and helplessness commonly labeled as anxiety is, for Kelly,
anxiety is created (experienced) only when one realizes that one has no constructs with which
to interpret an event. Under such circumstances an individual cannot predict, hence cannot fully comprehend
what is happening or solve the problem.
Guilt:
The guilty person is aware of having deviated from the important roles (self-images) by which she or he maintains relationships to
others.
Aggression:
When our constructs don't match up with reality, but there is another way: You can try to make reality match up with your
constructs.
Hostility:
Traditionally considered a disposition to behave vindictively toward or inflict harm upon others,
hostility in Kelly's system is merely an attempt to hold onto an invalid construct in the face of contradictory (invalidating) evidence.
 C-P-C Cycle of Transition
• Series of activities one engages when confronted with a novel situation.
PHASES
The C-P-C Cycle involves circumspection, preemption, and control.
1. Circumspection: The phase of the CPC cycle in which a person ponders several
constructs that might be useful in construing a novel situation
Ex: in car accident -- my fault/other person's, damage/no damage, injury/no
injury, etc
2. Preemption: The phase of the CPC cycle in which people decide which construct
to use to construe a novel situation; choose from constructs chosen in previous
stage
Ex: chose the my fault/other person's fault construct
3. Control: That phase of CPC cycle in which people choose a pole of the construct
chosen in the preemptive phase of the cycle and act in accordance with that pole
Ex: chose pole ‘my fault’ so give your insurance info. and apologize.
Goal is to have control over situation
 Critical Evaluation
Strengths
• Gives a much more detailed, holistic contribution to our
understanding of individual differences in personality than the trait
theory which sees personality as fixed and biologically determined.
• Personal construct theory sees individuals as having a fluid
personality which changes through the individual interacting with
their social world and so has contributed to individuals
understandings of personality by showing them how they can
change their constructions.
Weaknesses
• Findings can not be generalised like the trait theory can.
• It is a cognitive theory because it stresses how people think and view
the reality. It does not give emphasis to the unconscious processes.
 References

• Text: Kelland, M. (2017). Personality Theory. OER Commons.

Retrieved October 28, 2019, from
https://www.oercommons.org/authoring/22859-personality-
theory. Licensed under CC-BY-4.0.
• Jennifer Tellez. (2016, February 22). George Kelly’s personal
construct theory presentation. [Video File]. Retrieved from
https://youtu.be/Nu_K6YLjR1c. Standard YouTube License.
• Christopher Tong. (2018, November 27). Personal construct
theory (Kelly) | Brief video on personality psychology. [Video
File]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/yaiv8UVLiQo.
Standard YouTube License.