George Kelly was an interesting figure who based his work on concepts that were effective. He fell into many disciplines and was a humanist, existentialist, and phenomenologist. Everything in Kelly’s life was applied to Kelly’s theory of cognition. It had one basic concept:
Basic Postulate-People as Scientists
Kelly saw all humans are constantly seeking clarity and understanding in their lives by developing theories to predict other’s behavior in the future. Thus, reducing uncertainty. The major tool used to anticipate events is the personal construct. This is used to interpret, explain, give meaning to, or predict experiences. Specifically, people’s own personal experiences. If the construct is reinforced by experience, it is useful. If not, it must be changed or abandoned. (i.e. “friendly”, if the person is friendly, construct is supported. If unfriendly, construct must be changed). When these are combined, a Construct system is formed. This is just a bunch of constructs.
Personality
according to Kelly is collection of constructs that constitute his or her construct system at any given time.
Kelly emphasized that people are free to construct reality any way they wish (constructive alternativism). Kelly believed that people are free to choose constructs but are controlled by them after they are created.
Still, the question remains, how does someone create a construct? There are eleven corollaries which someone would use to create their constructs. They are:
1.
Construction corollary: This is where a person anticipates events by construing their replications.
2.
Individuality Corollary: Kelly believed that people differ from each other in their construction of events. This is the essence of Kelly’s theory.
3.
Organization Corollary: Each person characteristically evolves, for his convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs. Personal constructs are arranged in a hierarchy. There are superordinate construct which are more important. Subordinate are less important.
4.
Dichotomy corollary: Person’s construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs. Constructs are either are bipolar or dichotomous.
5.
Choice Corollary: Person chooses for himself that the alternative in a dichotomized construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of the his system. This means that a person can choose to be safe or take a risk. Definition is confirming previous constructs with new experiences. Extension is when new constructs are used that expand one’s construct if validated.
6.
Range Corollary: construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only. Focus of convenience, range of convenience.
7.
Experience Corollary: A person’s construction system varies as he successively construes the replications of events. Experience itself wasn’t important, how people construed that experience was.
8.
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. Some constructs are open to experience (permeable) more so than others. This view depends on the poles.
9.
Fragmentation: a person may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other.
10.
Commonality: to the extent that one person construes the construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, his psychological processes are similar to the other person. Looking at an experience in a similar way is what makes people similar.
11.
Sociality: 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.
Finally, the creativity cycle is the way people go about applying these postulates. When a situation is encountered, people go through three stages of construct development. A loosened construction phase is first. This is open to cognitive experimentation and most experiences will fall into this construct. As it becomes more predictable, a tightening will occur that so the construct can be evaluated. This is the second phase. If it is accurate, the construct is kept, and this is the test phase. If it is incorrect, it is abandoned, and the process begins again.
This is George Kelly’s theory in a nutshell. It’s interesting, but his work never became popular in the United States, but it is in Great Britain.
