Kelly - Personal Construct

Kelly is the last Learning Theorist that I learned. I kinda like his theory though, just because it's different from other learning theory.

George Kelly’s theory of personal constructs is like no other personality theory. It has been variously called a cognitive theory, a behavioral theory, an existential theory, and a phenomenological theory. Yet it is none of these. Perhaps the most appropriate term is “metatheory,” or a theory about theories. According to Kelly, all people (including those who build personality theories) anticipate events by the meanings or interpretations they place on those events. These meanings or interpretations are called constructs. People exist in a real world, but their behavior is shaped by their gradually expanding interpretation or construction of that world. They construe the world in their own way, and every construction is open to revision or replacement. People are not victims of circumstances, because alternative constructions are always available. Kelly called this philosophical position constructive alternatives.

Q: What is the basic postulate of Personal Construct?

A: Constructive alternativism is implied by Kelly’s theory of personal constructs, a theory he expressed in one basic postulate and 11 supporting corollaries. The basic postulate assumes that people are constantly active and that their activity is guided by the way they anticipate events.

The basic postulate assumes that “a person’s processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which [that person] anticipates events”

Q: What are the 11 Supporting Corollaries?

A: To elaborate his theory of personal constructs, Kelly proposed 11 supporting corollaries, all of which can be inferred from his basic postulate.

1. Similarity Among Events (Construction): a person anticipates events by construing their replications
2. Differences Among People (Individuality): Persons differ from each other in their construction of events
3. Relationship Among Constructs (Organization): characteristically evolve, for [their] convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between construct
4. Dichotomy of Constructs (Dichotomy): a person’s construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs
5. Choice Between Dichotomies (Choice): People choose for themselves that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which they anticipate the greater possibility for extension and definition of future constructs.
6. Range of Convenience (Range): personal constructs are finite and not relevant to everything. “A construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only”
7. Experience and Learning (Experience): A person’s construction system varies as he [or she] successively construes the replications of events
8. Adaptation to Experience (Modulation): The variation in a person’s construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within whose range of convenience the variants lie
9. Incompatible Constructs (Fragmentation): allows for the incompatibility of specific elements. “A person may successively employ a variety of constructive subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other”
10. Similarities Among People (Commonality): To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, [that person’s] processes are psychologically similar to those of the other person
11. Social Processes (Corollary): To the extent that people accurately construe the belief system of others, they may play a role in a social process involving those other people.

Q: What are the applications of personal construct?

A: 

Q: What is the psychotherapy in personal construct?

A: Psychological distress exists whenever people have difficulty validating their personal

constructs, anticipating future events, and controlling their present environment. When distress becomes unmanageable, they may seek outside help in the form of psychotherapy.

In Kelly’s view, people should be free to choose those courses of action most consistent with their prediction of events. In therapy, this approach means that clients, not the therapist, select the goal. Clients are active participants in the therapeutic process, and the therapist’s role is to assist them to alter their construct systems in order to improve efficiency in making predictions. 

As a technique for altering the clients’ constructs, Kelly used a procedure called fixed-role therapy. The purpose of fixed-role therapy is to help clients change their outlook on life (personal constructs) by acting out a predetermined role, first within the relative security of the therapeutic setting and then in the environment beyond therapy where they enact the role continuously over a period of several weeks.

Together with the therapist, clients work out a role, one that includes attitudes and behaviors not currently part of their core role. In writing the fixed-role sketch, the client and therapist are careful to include the construction systems of other people. How will the client’s spouse or parents or boss or friends construe and react to this new role? Will their reactions help the client reconstrue events more productively?

This new role is then tried out in everyday life in much the same manner that a scientist tests a hypothesis—cautiously and objectively. In fact, the fixed-role sketch is typically written in the third person, with the actor assuming a new identity. The client is not trying to be another person but is merely playing the part of someone who is worth knowing. The role should not be taken too seriously; it is only an act, something that can be altered as evidence warrants.

Fixed-role therapy is not aimed at solving specific problems or repairing obsolete constructs. It is a creative process that allows clients to gradually discover previously hidden aspects of themselves. In the early stages, clients are introduced only to peripheral roles; but then, after they have had time to become comfortable with minor changes in personality structure, they try out new core roles that permit more profound personality change (Kelly, 1955).

Prior to developing the fixed-role approach, Kelly (1969a) stumbled on an unusual procedure that strongly resembles fixed-role therapy. After becoming uncomfortable with Freudian techniques, he decided to offer his clients “preposterous interpretations” for their complaints. Some were far-fetched Freudian interpretations, but nevertheless, most clients accepted these “explanations” and used them as guides to future action. For example, Kelly might tell a client that strict toilet training has caused him to construe his life in a dogmatically rigid fashion but that he need not continue to see things in this way. To Kelly’s surprise, many of his clients began to function better! The key to change was the same as with fixed-role therapy—clients must begin to interpret their lives from a different perspective and see themselves in a different role.

Q: What is the Rep Test?

A: Another procedure used by Kelly, both inside and outside therapy, was the Role Construct Repertory (Rep) test. The purpose of the Rep test is to discover ways in which people construe significant people in their lives. With the Rep test, a person is given a Role Title list and asked to designate people who fit the role titles by writing their names on a card.