Kelly\'s personal constructs theory PDF

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Knowing an individual's personality means knowing their building system. Kelly's personality structure consists of a compartment system consisting of binary distinctions (constructions) in which each compartment can be identified by the relationship it has with everyone else.
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KELLY'S PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS THEORY

Introduction and general characterization Kelly's theory of personal constructs occupies an interesting position at the heart of the overall picture of this subject, emphasizing the individual's perceptual and conceptual categories as keys to understanding all his psychological processes. Kelly's position contrasts in many ways with personality theories based on dimensions or traits Most personality theories have been interested in adjectives that are commonly used to qualify people (introverted, intelligent, funny) as attributes of the object being graded. In front of them, Kelly's theory is interested in them as modes of construction of the qualifying person. Men, Kelly says, look at the world through cognitive guidelines or categories. These guidelines, or ways of building the world, are the constructs. A construct is a descriptive category used to categorize events and represents our special way of building the world. All of these constructs are bipolar or dichotomous. The term "extraverted" is a pole of the extraversionintroversion bipolar construct. Personal constructs are essentially unique, particular, ways of classifying the world; therefore, we cannot know the cognitive dimension that a person is using until we know the two poles of the construct. Kelly's theory is therefore essentially idiographical,focusing on the particular ways in which an individual confronts his world, holist, is interested in the total aspects of personality, rather than specific modes of operation, and has been referred to as constructivist -contextualist. Constructivist by the notion, fundamental to Kelly, that a decisive aspect in man is his effort to conceptually build his world. Phenomena take on their full meaning when they relate to the way the individual builds them. The qualifier as a contextualist refers to the fact that, although it is the idiosyncmatic ways of conceptuing reality, rather than environmental events, that will determine our actions, in the development and evolution of the cognitive system play an important role in experience, the context of external reality. It is therefore an ancestor of recent models that insist on the interaction between environmental events and personal building modes to fully understand human action. In Kelly's theory, man is equated to a scientist. The theoretical models and philosophies of life have a certain scope, which marks the breadth of phenomena it encompasses, and a center ofconvenience,which covers those aspects of reality for which theory, scientific or personal, is more useful. Scientific models and personal philosophies are useful frameof of reference that summarize our accumulated knowledge about things. Concrete predictions

(explanatory hypotheses) are apparent from them and, in a subsequent process, will be accepted or rejected on the basis of their usefulness in adequately anticipating the facts. It is by virtue of this empirical, scientific confrontation in one case, personal in another, that the initial model is subject to continuous change. The model of man that follows from the above comparison is represented as a being whose fundamental activity is to organize reality (abstract, generalize, prosecute, value and predict). For Kelly, human behavior is essentially anticipatory, not reactive. All predictions are made from the total cognitive category system of each individual. This system, made up of an infinite number of bipolar constructs, will be your main instrument to manage in the world, your guide to making predictions. The differences between men depend especially on the particular way in which each builds his own world according to his own cognitive categories. Formulation of the theory: the fundamental postulate of the 11 corollary The fundamental postulate goes on to say that all of a person's psychological processes, including his or her external behavior, are determined by how an individual anticipates what will happen in the future: A person's processes are psychologically channeled by how he anticipates events. The following corollary are derived from this postulate: Construction Corollary: One person anticipates events by building their replicas. "Replica" refers to the usual concept in Experimental Psychology, that is, an experiment analogous to an earlier one that tries to verify its results. Through aftershocks, people anticipate events. This implies a process of construction, that is, of active interpretation of events. When confronted with external phenomena, people carry out processes of abstraction by which they find in them a certain order and a certain logic. Only when events of certain principles have been endowed, when they have been found with significance and regularity, can they be reduced and anticipated.

Corollary of Individuality: People differ from each other by the way they build events. The basis of individual differences lies in the processes of construction (phenomenological character of theory). Two people with similar stories may have different psychological processes, and at the same time a certain similarity in construction ensures a resemblance in other psychological processes even with disparate personal histories. Organizational corollary: The different individual constructs are structurally organized in an orderly system whose goal is to avoid contradictory predictions. Each person develops, in a characteristic way and according to his/her convenience, a system of constructs that involves ordinal relationships between them. Individual differences depend not only on the different constructions of events, but also on the organization and order among the constructs. The structure of the construct system is intended to avoid the conflict that could be created if

there are conflicting anticipations and predictions about the same event. The hierarchical structure of the system and the ordinal relationships between its elements organize and prioritize between them. Diastomy Corollary: A person's system of constructs is composed of a limited number of dichotomous constructs. Our ways of seeing reality are structured around certain axes that are bipolar: one of the poles, called the nominal pole or likeness, always implies the similarity between at least two elements; the other, contrast pole, serves as the opposite or negative of it. According to Kelly, the entire structure of the cognitive system lends itself to binary mathematical analysis. There are constructs that seem to fall outside this rule of the chorolarium of dichotomy; for example, the concept of self does not clearly see any contrast pole. When only the nominal pole is known in a construct, we speak of "submerged construct". The concept of red, for example, may have as its opposite its complementary color, green, or any other color other than red. We will study both poles in order to identify the full personal dimension of the subject. Corollary of choice: If the mission of the system of constructs as a whole is to anticipate and predict events (fundamental postulate) and if the whole element of the system consists of two poles (cvocalalacycle of dichotomy), in the prediction of events we will use that pole of each construct that best serves us to predict. The predictive gain is expressed by the concept of system development. This development has two different possibilities: the extension or the definition. In the first case, the elaboration is achieved by means of expanding the system in such a way that it enlarges a greater number of phenomena. In the second, the elaboration implies greater precision as if it were refined in the predictions so that the small number of events was increasingly predicted. In the first case, the extension gain has the counterparty of an increased risk of error; in the second, predictive accuracy is limited in the number of phenomena it encompasses. Depending on the total system of constructs, the risky individual will develop towards a greater extent and the cautious towards a definition. The concept of choice seems to refer, on the other hand, to an intention on the part of the individual. Corolario of application or scope: Constructs always have a certain scope of application, beyond which they are not useful, and a center of convenience, referring to those aspects for which they are especially suitable. Constructs are nothing more than work tools that are maintained or changed depending on their usefulness. Corollary of experience: A person's system of constructs varies with the successive construction of replicas of events. People change our views after the elaboration, abstraction and interpretation of events; it is our construction of facts and not mere exposure to them, which changes our system.

Modulation Corollary: The variation of the construct system is limited by the permeability of constructs within whose range of convenience variants fall. Learning is limited by the total system of personal constructs. To the extent that a person possesses schemes or cognitive categories that allow him to properly cope with his environment, he will not be so exposed to the entire sensory input that he constantly reaches; but that also implies that the possibility of learning from the experience and therefore modifying the system will depend on the characteristics of that system, and especially its permeability. A construct is permeable if it admits new elements in its scope of convenience, which means the ability to discriminate new experiences to those it already encompasses. In order for this change to occur, there needs to be a construct, hierarchically superior to the above, that is permeable enough to allow for changes without deorganizing the total system. Fragmentation corollary: A person may successively employ a variety of construct subsystems that are inferentially incompatible with each other, and can be integrated at a higher level. Corollary of communality: To the extent that one person uses a construction of the experience similar to that of another, his psychological processes will be similar to those of that. On the contrary, the likeness in past history need not ensure communality in psychological processes if the construction of that story has been different. A common cultural basis, through social norms and roles, ensures a certain similarity in psychological processes. For this reason, the instruments that evaluate personal constructs find, in addition to the idiosyncrasic constructs, a number of constructs shared by members of the same culture. Corollary of sociality: To play an important role in relation to a person you have to understand the way you see things. The ability to properly anticipate other people's constructs is essential for certain professions, such as psychotherapy. It is difficult to understand if there is no communality in the psychological processes of individuals. The position of theory in relation to fundamental personality problems Structure Knowing an individual's personality means knowing their system of constructs. The personality structure for Kelly consists of a system of compartments made up of binary distinctions (constructs) in which each compartment can be identified by the relationship it has with everyone else. There are nuclear constructs,central to the system, and peripheral constructs,less decisive forinternal organization;permeable constructs, which allow new elements in your range of convenience, andwaterproof,who do not allow them;firm,if they offer specific predictions, andbums,from which there are no specific expectations. There are verbal and preverbalconstructs, the latter beingthose in which abstraction is not accompanied by a corresponding verbal representation.

Constructs can be qualified by their degree of abstraction, setting different levels. There are super-ordered constructs, superior in centrality and degree of abstraction, and others subordinate to them. According to the implications between some constructs and others, Kelly distinguishes between apropriative, constelatory and propositionalconstructs. One construct is propositionally relative to another when it leaves its elements open in all respects. The blonde-brown construct leaves the elements to which it is applied freedom to be included in other dimensions (e.g. goodness, hardness, etc.). There is a constelatory relationship between two constructs when one of them allows the elements of the other to belong to other categories, but sets their membership to some. For example, the "English" stereotype implies for many people a constellation of elements such as cold, phlegmatic and civilized. Finally, an appropriationary construct exercises decisive power over its elements, appropriated exclusively from them. The "criminal" construct, for example, implies a restriction on other possibilities of constructing the element to which it applies: it defines it in a decisive way. Hinkle developed 4 possible guidelines of involvement between constructs: Parallel: when each pole of one construct implies the corresponding one. Reciprocal: same as the previous one but also the other way around. The 2 constructs are functionally equivalent. Orthogonal: when A implies B, but A does not imply B (anxious assumes little perceptive, but not necessarily perceptive). Ambiguous: when A or A implies B or B; the same label is used to refer to different constructs. Evaluation and diagnosis To learn how people build their environment, Kelly developed an evaluation technique, the Rep-test. It consists of a list of roles that are meaningful to people (parents, siblings, husbands, friends). The subject has to write the specific names of the people who, in his case, represent those roles and then take them in pairs and compare them to each other as opposed to each of the remaining items in the list. For example, the subject must find a quality in which his father and mother are similar to each other and that in turn distinguishes them from himself. With young children and under-CI people, elements have been replaced with drawings and photographs, and comparisons have been limited to the search for a common quality. As a subjective assessment technique, it consistently measures individual cognitive elaborations, allowing the subject to rate important characters or events in their midst with their own personal constructs. The latter is obtained thanks to a grid in which the subject, once obtained its constructs, evaluates each of the roles or items in the list according to the dimensions it has generated.

With this procedure, if we attend the constructs (the rows) we find the scope of application and the use of each of its poles; if you look at the roles or elements (columns) we get the operational definitions that the subject makes of people according to their own categories. This method allows to find the basic structure of each subject's construct system, for which Kelly himself resorted to a nonparametric factorial analysis. The Rep-test is considered a consistent instrument, which yields very acceptable data of reliability and validity. People consistently use certain constructs, not only to evaluate the same people at different times, but also to evaluate different people. Various researches have shown the high reliability of the Rep-test both in terms of the elements and the relationships between the constructs. The most reliable measure of this test is offered by the so-called "id score", i.e. the average distance between the grades the subject makes of himself and the ratings he makes of others. The position of theory in relation to fundamental personality problems. Personality dynamics and evolutionary development Kelly insists that human beings are basic and fundamentally active, so the concept of motivation is unnecessary and irrelevant. The effort to gain control over the environment through more accurate predictions of events is the activating force that directs behavior. There is, therefore, a motivational theory "intrinsic" in the theory of personal constructs that has a very specific center of convenience, probably marked by the type of people on which Kelly elaborated his theory (students or teachers, close to intellectual work). The scope of convenience of Kelly's theory is reduced to the extent that the characteristics of the population deviate greatly from intellectual activity. Kelly's theory places great emphasis on the active and dynamic process of behavior, and can therefore be considered a theory of constant change. It is necessary to progressively modify the system of constructs according to the experience itself. This process will result in significant emotional changes following cognitive modifications. The treatment of emotional concepts is basically cognitive, explaining them as effects of substantial changes that occur in the system of constructs. Anxiety is conceived as the recognition that the events with which man encounters fall, for the most part, outside the scope of his system of constructs. The anxious is one who is confronted with a reality that does not know how to drive. Its system of constructs does not serve to anticipate the facts, and therefore lacks the resources to function before them; you have difficulties in building and anticipating your surroundings. If the person repeatedly experiences the feeling of anxiety, he begins to perceive as imminent the need for a change in the structure of his system of constructs and, often, this perception is accompanied by a sense of threat.Threat is

defined as awareness of the proximity of a major change in the structure of the construct system. Some of the resistance many patients show to behavior change is because you can't abandon a behavior-problem until an alternative is available. Abandoning our way of seeing life (changing the system of constructs) is a security threat. The fact that any change poses a risk explains this sense of threat, and at the same time a reaction of hostility. By hostility Kelly understands the ongoing effort to distort the evidence and make it consistent with some social prediction that has already proved to be a failure; it is a way to preserve the individual from the chaotic situation that would entail recognize that their system of constructs has failed. Only if an alternative way of seeing the situation is found will hostile sentiment be abandoned. For Kelly, hostility is the nominal pole of a construct whose pole of contrast is curiosity, interest in other people's views. Hostility is distinct from aggression, as Kelly considersinactivity as the opposite of the latter. The aggressive person behaves in this way to actively try to validate their constructs and extend as far as possible their scope. Aggression is the active extension of the perceptual field itself. The feeling of guilt is interpreted as the consciousness of being deviated from the structure. The basic role that a person attributes to life is central. Once that role is assumed, guilt occurs when the individual functions inconsistently with him, regardless of specific ethical connotations. For example, a mother may feel guilt if she spends more time studying than to being with her children. Two more dynamic processes attract Kelly's attention: the cycles of creativity and decision-making.In the latter, the CAC cycle is given:circumspection-appropriationcontrol.Circumspection occurs by observing in a multidimensional way all the possible alternatives involved in the decision; appropriation is the choice of one of them, and control, selection, between the two poles of the construct that is used as the category to apprehend the situation, from one that allows for greater cognitive processing. The cycle of creativity occurs when you try to juxtapose and play with the different elements involved in a problem in a flexible way, without trying to find an immediate solution. The implications of Kelly's model for the evolutionary development of personality bear close similarity to Piaget and Werner's theories. Psychological evolution must run parallel to the changes of the system of constructs: consistent evolutionary change, from vague, global and non-verbal constructs to specific, precise and verbal ones. The main changes are in the direction of greater differentiation in the constructs, the ...