GEORGE KELLY (copy)

Constructive Alternativism

• There are various ways in which the world that surrounds us can be understood; there always exist alternative perspectives for us to choose from.

• Just like Alfred Adler, this view was influenced by Hans Vaihinger's
  "philosophy of 'as if.""

• And again just like Adler, Kelly believed that one's interpretation of events is more important than the events themselves.

Man-the-Scientist

• People develop hypotheses about the consequence of their behavior, and they evaluate the validity of those hypotheses in terms of the accuracy of their predictions.

• Scientists construct theories that lead to better and better predictions, and individuals try to construct anticipatory systems that give them better and better sense of what is going to happen if they act in a certain way.

• A healthy person is like a good scientist, adjusting constructs according to new data.

• The unhealthy person is like a bad scientist, not changing his constructs even if it does not work.

Focus on the Construer

• When a person makes a statement about the world, we should understand that the statement reveals more about the person than about the world.

• Statements about people and the world are best considered as proposals or hypotheses, but many treat them as factual claims.

Motivation

• This is an unnecessary and redundant construct, because people are active by definition since we are alive!

• People act as they do, not because of forces that act on them or in them, but because of the alternatives they perceive as a function of their construal of the world.

Two Types of Motivational Forces:

• Push Theories: drive, motive, stimulus

• Pull Theories: purpose, value, need

Being Oneself

• There is no internal agent.

Objections to the formulations of the Self:

• The Self often serves as a mask behind which we hide the real self.
  To think of oneself as an introvert is to impose a label that sets up expectations for behavior.
  

• Kelly thought of one's self-image as fluid, not a predetermined reality.

PERSONAL CONSTRUCT

• This is a way in which some things are construed as being alike yet different from others.

BIPOLAR

RANGE OF CONVENIENCE

LOCUS OF CONVENIENCE

PERMEABILITY

PREEMPTIVE

CONSTELLATORY

PROPOSITIONAL

CORE

PERIPHERAL

Bipolar:

Constructs are dichotomous.

Range of Convenience:Range of Convenience:

Certain constructs have certain range of applications only.

Locus of Convenience:

the class of objects to which it is most relevant.

Permeability

the ease with which they can be extended to new objects/events.

Preemptive

This makes nothing else about the object matters.

Constellatory

triggers other constructs without additional information.

Propositional

Designating an object would not lead to other judgements about the object.

Core

central to a person's sense of who he is.

Peripheral

less fundamental and more amenable to change.

FUNDAMENTAL POSTULATE AND ITS COROLLARIES

Fundamental Postulate

Construction corollary

Individual corollary

1. Organization corollary

2. Dichotomy corollary

3. Choice corollary

4. Range corollary

5. Experience corollary

6. Modulation corollary

7. Fragmentation corollary

8. Commonality corollary

9. Sociality corollary

FUNDAMENTALS POSTULATE

• A person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he or she anticipates events.

• This is the core of Kelly's position.

• A person's understanding of the world and behavior in that world are directed by his expectations and anticipationsabout what will happen if he/she acts in a certain way.

Anticipation

is both the push and pull of the psychology of personal constructs.

CONSTRUCTION COROLLARY

• A person anticipates events by constructing their replications.

• No two events are exactly alike, but people see enough similarities among some events to create a construct to represent them.

Replication: using experience to identify recurrent themes in meanings of events

• This is like a cognitive version of Skinner's reinforcement theory.

- Key Idea: Similarities among events

if a man’s mother has given him a birthday present for the last thirty years, his prediction that he will receive another present from her on his next birthday makes sense.

Similarly, if one has watched a particular television program at 11:30 p.m. on weeknights for the past several years, one’s prediction that it will again be on television at the same time next Monday night is a reasonable one.

INDIVIDUALITY COROLLARY

• Persons differ from each other in their construction of events.

• People differ not only because they have been exposed to different events, but because they have developed different approaches to anticipation of the same events.

• No two people interpret an event in exactly the same way.

mother and daughter react to an emergency differently based on the experience of each.

ORGANIZATION COROLLARY

• Each person characteristically evolves, for convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs.

• Each person arranges his/her constructs into a hierarchical system that characterizes that personality.

• This helps minimize incompatibilities and inconsistencies.

• Such a system continuously evolves with experience.

When you are talked into a blind date, and your friend spends a great deal of energy trying to convince you that the person you will be going out with has a great personality, you know, you just know, that they will turn out to look like Quasimodo. How do you get from “great personality”

DICHOTOMY COROLLARY

• A person's construction system is composed of a finite number dichotomous constructs."

• Dichotomous constructs are constructs that are opposite to each other.

• In nature, things may not always opposite, or either-or.

• However, to form a construct, a person must be able to see similarities between events and contrast those events with their opposite pole.

• Peace can only be understood in comparison to war or-chaos and vice-versa.

• Comfort can be understood in contrast to discomfort or suffering.

A college course may be either interesting or uninteresting, but it cannot be both at the same time.

Good or bad

CHOICE COROLLARY

• A person chooses that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which he/she anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his/her system.

• A behavior reduces to a choice between

  1. further defining the existing construct system, or acting in a manner that

  2. extends the range of convenience of the construct system.

• Choices will be made in favor of whatever it is that will provide the best basis for improving the future anticipation of events.

• Believing that tattoos signify that a person is bad, a girl can either believe that her boyfriend with tattoos is a bad person OR not.

• If she believes he is bad, it is for the purpose of further proving the existing construct, making it stronger.

• But if she believes he is not, because the boyfriend showed good qualities, it will expand the conception of having tattoos to people who are good, and not just to those who are bad.

• Either way, the goal is to improve the person's ability to anticipate the character and behavior of people with tattoos in the future.

Choosing to be in comfort zone or have fun

RANGE COROLLARY

• A construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only.

• In other words, a construct is limited to a particular range of convenience or range of events only.

• Brightness and darkness are applicable to the color of a computer monitor, but not to the taste of coffee.

EXPERIENCE COROLLARY

• A person's construction system varies as he/she successively constructs the replications of events.

• The constructions we place on events represent hypotheses about the consequences of behavior, and we use the actual outcomes to validate the construct system, just as a scientist uses data to validate a theory.

• It is not what happens around him/her that makes a person experienced, but the successive construing and reconstruing of what happens that enriches the experience of life.

FRAGMENTATION COROLLARY

A person may successfully employ a variety of construction subsystems that are inferentially incompatible with each other.

- For example, a man might be protective of his wife, yet encourage her to be more independent. Protection and independence may be incompatible with each other on one level, but on a larger level, both are subsumed under the construct love.

SOCIALITY COROLLARY

• To the extent that one person construes the construction process of another, he/she may play a role in a social process involving the other person.

• Kelly believed that people can engage in meaningful relationships only if they understand each other's construal process.

COMMONALITY COROLLARY

• To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience that is similar to that employed by another, his/her psychological processes are similar to those of the other person.

• Just as dissimilar construction of events lead to individual differences, similar construction of events leads people to behave in similar ways.

• This accounts for within-cultural similarities.

THE CONTINUUM OF COGNITIVE AWARENESS

PREVERBAL CONSTRUCTS

SUBMERGED CONSTRUCT

SUSPENDED CONSTRUCT

Preverbal Constructs

• These are constructs not coded in linguistic form, they cannot be articulated but continue to influence our behavior.

Submerged Constructs

• This is when one pole of a dichotomous construct is less available than the other

Suspended Constructs

• Ideas and memories are only available if constructs that can represent them exist.

• If a dichotomous construct disappears from the construct system, this may result into temporary forgetting of a memory until a new construct can represent them again.

• A 6-year old boy might not yet have the construct of let say a flirt person....so encounters of a woman flirting with her dad might not stick to his memory because there was no construct to encode it. But once he acquires that construct as he grows older, memories of the women in his past might emerge into his mind now that it can me encoded.

Modulation Corollary

- The variation in a person’s construction system is limited by the permeability of the construct within whose range of convenience the

variants lie.

- The extent to which people revise their constructs is related to the degree of permeability of their existing constructs.

- Goodness can be applied to persons with tattoos…. But not to things with “tattoos”.

- This is similar to range corollary, which says that there are only some objects to which a construct can be applied. That one focuses on the objects to which the construct is applicable, while Modulation corollary focuses on the construct’s expanse of applicability per se.