George Kelly's Personal Construct Theory and Perceptual Mechanisms

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George Kelly's Personal Construct Theory and Perceptual Mechanisms

Psychology of Personality · Chapter 9: Cognitive Theories of PersonalitySection 9.2 · lesson 54 of 838 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

If you never meet reality directly, then your interpretations are theories - and theories can be replaced.

  • Explain what Kelly means by the person as scientist
  • Define a personal construct and its bipolar structure
  • State the fundamental postulate and its consequences
  • Describe constructive alternativism and the Rep Test

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Transcript

Everything said in the video, section by section (1,068 words). Read along, or search it.

Cognitive Theories of Personality

Kelly's Personal Construct Theory

Two people sit through the same meeting. They walk out with accounts of it that cannot both be right. Neither of them is lying, and neither has a worse memory. George Kelly built an entire theory of personality out of that observation. His answer is that nobody responds to reality directly. We respond to reality as filtered through a system we built ourselves. This section works through that system, and through the striking claim behind it. That every person is running the same procedure a scientist runs.

The Problem

Nobody Responds to Reality Directly

Start with the problem, because the theory is a response to it. Kelly's claim is that we do not respond to reality directly. We respond to reality as filtered through our own unique system of constructs. And it is worth being careful about what kind of claim that is. The filtering is not a distortion laid on top of clean perception. It is what perceiving is. There is no unfiltered version underneath to compare it with. That single move relocates personality entirely. It stops being a set of dispositions a person has. And becomes an interpretive apparatus a person runs.

The Image

The Person as Scientist

Kelly's theory begins with a striking image. The person as scientist. A scientist forms hypotheses, tests them, and revises them. Kelly says every individual does exactly this. They form an expectation about how a situation will turn out. They act, and observe whether the expectation held. And they adjust it when the prediction fails. This is not a metaphor about people who happen to be analytical. It is a claim about what everyone is always doing, most of it without noticing. Each construct, on this view, is a small theory about how things will turn out.

The Unit

Constructs Have Two Poles

The basic unit of that system is the personal construct. A construct is a bipolar dimension used to interpret and anticipate events. Friendly against hostile. Safe against dangerous. The bipolarity is not decoration. It is essential. To call something friendly is, at the same time, to say it is not hostile. A construct always brings its opposite pole with it. The organized network of a person's constructs is their construct system. And for Kelly these are the basic units of personality. Not traits, not drives, not defences. The person is their construct system. An accumulated, working model of the world, constantly tested against experience.

The Cycle

How a Construct Earns Its Place

Follow one construct through a full cycle. A bipolar dimension gets brought to an event. That is the construct being applied. It generates an anticipation. A prediction about how this will turn out. The person then acts on that prediction. The construct is tested in action. The event either confirms it, or it does not. And when it does not, the construct is revised. Kelly calls this reconstruction. Notice that the test is not a matter of comfort or preference. A construct earns its place by predicting accurately. One that keeps predicting badly is under pressure, whether or not the person likes it.

The Postulate

Behavior Is Aimed Forwards

Kelly summarised the whole theory in a single fundamental postulate. A person's processes are psychologically channeled by the ways they anticipate events. Read that slowly, because it is doing a lot. Behavior is channeled by anticipation. Which makes behavior future-oriented and predictive. Not driven by what happened in childhood. Not pushed along by an internal drive state. Pulled forward by an expectation about what comes next. Set that beside the theories in earlier chapters. Where they look backwards for causes, Kelly looks forwards for anticipations. And he claims the explanation is there instead.

The Principle

Constructive Alternativism

Central to Kelly's view is a principle called constructive alternativism. It holds that there is no single, fixed way to interpret any event. And that all current interpretations are open to revision. Three consequences follow. Two people perceive the same situation differently because they apply different constructs. A single person can re-perceive an event by adopting an alternative construction. And perception is therefore an active, selective act of construing. Rather than passive reception of what is out there. The practical force of this is unusual for a personality theory. If the construction is revisable, so is the response that followed from it. And nothing has to be uncovered or excavated first.

The Failure Mode

When Predictions Keep Failing

The theory also has a specific account of distress, and it is a precise one. When existing constructs repeatedly fail to predict events, the person experiences anxiety. Anxiety here is not fear of any particular object. It is what it feels like when your working model of the world stops working. And the pressure that anxiety creates has a direction. It is pressure to revise the system. Which leads to Kelly's definition of health, and it is unusual. Healthy functioning means a flexible construct system. One that can be updated when predictions fail. So rigidity is the pathology. Not any particular construct a person happens to hold.

The Instrument

The Rep Test Makes Constructs Visible

A theory about private interpretive dimensions could easily have been untestable. Kelly did not leave it there. He developed the Role Construct Repertory Test, usually called the Rep Test. It is a method for eliciting an individual's personal constructs. And that is what makes the theory unusually practical for assessment. It makes constructs measurable, rather than merely postulated. But notice what the Rep Test does not do. It does not score a person against a fixed set of categories. It elicits the categories the person is already using. The instrument adapts to the person, rather than the reverse.

In Practice

The Quiet Team Member

Take a concrete case, because the theory can sound abstract until you apply it. A manager construes a quiet team member through a disengaged-committed construct. Read through that dimension, silence means disengagement. And the manager responds accordingly, probably badly. Now apply a different construct to the same silence. Careful against impulsive. Through that dimension, the same silence reveals a thoughtful contributor. Nothing about the team member has changed. The construct changed, and with it the behavior it produced in the manager. That is constructive alternativism doing entirely practical work.

Consolidate

Four Claims, One Method

Four claims, and one method that follows from them. The person is a scientist, forming, testing and revising expectations. The unit of personality is the bipolar construct, not the trait. The fundamental postulate makes behavior future-oriented and predictive. And constructive alternativism makes every interpretation revisable. Why it matters is that changing a construct can change behavior and feeling. So the practical question is always the same one. When you are stuck, ask what alternative construction of this situation is available.

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FAQ

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About George Kelly's Personal Construct Theory and Perceptual Mechanisms

What is George Kelly's personal construct theory?
George Kelly's personal construct theory holds that people respond not to reality directly but to reality as filtered through their own system of personal constructs. Kelly pictured each person as a scientist who forms expectations, acts, observes the outcome, and revises the expectation when it fails. His fundamental postulate states that a person's processes are psychologically channeled by the ways they anticipate events, which makes behavior future-oriented.
What is a personal construct?
A personal construct is a bipolar dimension a person uses to interpret and anticipate events, such as friendly versus hostile or safe versus dangerous. Calling something friendly also implies it is not hostile, so each construct carries its opposite pole. Kelly treated constructs as the basic units of personality, and their organized network forms the construct system. Constructs that keep predicting poorly come under pressure to be revised.
What is constructive alternativism?
Constructive alternativism is Kelly's principle that no event has a single fixed interpretation and that every current interpretation is open to revision. Two people perceive the same situation differently because they apply different constructs, and one person can re-perceive an event by adopting another construction. A manager who reads a quiet employee as disengaged might instead see a careful, thoughtful contributor, and treat that person differently.
What is the Rep Test in psychology?
The Role Construct Repertory Test, or Rep Test, is George Kelly's method for eliciting the personal constructs an individual actually uses. Rather than scoring people against a fixed set of categories, it draws out the person's own bipolar dimensions, so the instrument adapts to the person. This made Kelly's constructs measurable rather than merely assumed, which gives the theory unusual practical value for assessment.

About the Psychology of Personality course

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Psychology of Personality (Psychology 300) carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.
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