Finals Flashcards
Psychology of Personal Constructs
George Alexander Kelly
Perhaps the most appropriate term is “metatheory,” or a
theory about theories.
Psychology of personal constructs
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
Ask questions, formulate hypotheses, test them, draw conclusions, and
try to predict future events.
Steps in a scientific study
Make observations, construe relationships among events, formulate
theories, generate hypotheses, test those that are plausible, and reach
conclusions from their experiments.
In quest for life’s meaning
Open for reformulation through imagination and foresight.
Person as a scientist
Kelly believed that the person, not the facts, holds the key to an individual’s future. Facts and events do not dictate conclusions; rather, they carry meanings for us to discover.
Constructive alternativism
We are all constantly faced with alternatives, which we can explore
if we choose, but in any case, we must assume responsibility for
how we construe our worlds.
Constructive alternativism
It is one’s way of seeing how things (or people) are alike and
yet different from other things (or people).
Personal Constructs
People’s behaviors (thoughts and actions) are directed by the
way they see the future.
Basic Postulate
3 basic Postulate
Person’s processes
Channelized
Ways of anticipating events
Refers to a living, changing, moving human being.
Person’s Processes
To suggest that people move with a direction
through a network of pathways or channels.
Channelized
which suggests that people guide
their actions according to their predictions of the future
Ways of anticipating events
- Similarities Among Events
- No two events are exactly alike, yet we construe similar events so
that they are perceived as being the same. - E.g : One sunrise is never identical to another, but our construct dawn
conveys our recognition of some similarity or some replication of
events. Although two dawns are never exactly alike, they may be
similar enough for us to construe them as the same event
Construction Corollary
- differences aming people
-No two people put an experience together in exactly the same
way.
● E.g. Even identical twins living in nearly identical environments do
not construe events exactly the same. For example, part of Twin
A’s environment includes Twin B, an experience not shared by Twin
B.
Individuality corollary
