George Kelly's theory of personal constructs

George Kelly's theory of personal constructs It was ahead of its time in describing the human personality in a way similar to the constructivist models that have become popular in recent decades.

In this sense, Kelly's work cannot be strictly framed within the cognitivist orientation, dominant at the time.

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Kelly's theory of personal constructs

The psychologist and educator George Alexander Kelly (1905-1967) posed his personality model in his two works fundamentals: "Theory of personal constructs", published in 1955, and "Theory of personality", by 1966.

In a similar way to factorial or trait personality models (for example, Raymond B. Cattell or the Big five de Costa and McCrae), Kelly proposes the use of qualifying adjectives to explain personality. However, in this case the important thing is the way each individual constructs and gives meaning to words in question.

Kelly conceives of the human being as a scientist who builds and modifies with experience his set of knowledge and hypotheses, or their philosophy of life, in order to anticipate the results of their behavior and other events. This takes place through the formation of personal constructs, descriptive categories that we use to conceptualize events.

Personal constructs are dichotomous and bipolar; This means that we understand personality and human experience in general from adjectives with opposite poles. Some examples of personal constructs would be the happy-sad, smart-silly, and tall-short dichotomies. Constructs are not always bipolar, as we will see later.

This author considered that his perspective can be considered as “constructive alternativism”. By this he meant that, when studying human personality and thought, it is convenient to focus on the relevance of a interpretation of reality for a specific person rather than in its degree of veracity compared to the facts objectives.

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The eleven corollaries of this theory

The fundamental postulate of Kelly's theory states that all an individual's psychological processes depend on the way she anticipates events. Eleven corollaries are derived from this core idea, which are very useful to understand how personal constructs work and how personality develops according to this author.

1. Building

Human beings use abstract thinking to build mental models of reality and with them predict events. A) Yes, from events of the past we anticipate those of the future.

2. Individuality

The psychological differences between people depend on the degree of similarity between their construct systems, that is, between their respective ways of mentally constructing reality, since these are the ones that determine behavior and content mental.

3. Organization

Personal construct systems They are organized hierarchically according to their scope of application. This allows avoiding contradictions when predicting through different constructs, since there will always be one that has a greater weight.

4. Dichotomy

As we have said, according to Kelly the people we conceptualize reality from opposite pairs of terms, such as "hot-cold" or "nervous-calm." When only one of the poles is known, we say that it is a submerged construct.

5. Choice

Extensive construct systems allow many events to be predicted but the risk of error is high; on the contrary, those that are more restrictive minimize the probability of failures but anticipate fewer events. People with a more risky character tend towards the extension, and those cautious towards definition.

6. Ambit

The scope or application corollary refers to the fact that each construct is effective in predicting a certain range of phenomena. The concept of “convenience center” is used to talk about the aspects for which the construct is particularly useful.

7. Experience

Although life experience can modify a person's construct system, this is not the case. spontaneous but takes place through the psychological construction that we make of the events in question. The susceptibility to change of a particular construct or system of constructs it is a very relevant factor in personality.

8. Modulation

This postulate talks about permeability, that is, the ability of a construct to introduce elements new in their scope of application and the possibility of modifying the hierarchically superior constructs this.

9. Fragmentation

Fragmentation is the ability of a construct system to include subsystems of which Contradictory predictions are drawn without causing a disorganization of the whole. This corollary is closely related to that of organization, since fragmentation depends on the ranking of the constructs.

10. Communality

A relevant aspect of Kelly's theory is the emphasis that construct systems of two people who share the same culture will have a greater chance of being alike if not. Therefore, the same will happen with behavior, values ​​and other psychological processes and mental contents.

11. Sociability

The eleventh and final corollary of the theory of personal constructs states that it is more likely that understand an individual and that we like him if we are able to reproduce his system of constructs. This postulate can be clearly related to the concept of empathy, and is influenced by the corollary of commonality.