Kelly Flashcards
What did Kelly believe?
He believed that all people are scientists because we all use hypotheses in our day-to-day lives
Ex: you are supposed to meet up with someone. Person doesn’t show up. You form hypothesis that person is late because of traffic or had a family emergency
What is Kelly’s core tendency?
Truth-seeking
What is Kelly’s theory called?
Constructive Alternativism or “Personal Construct Theory”
What does Constructive Alternativism state?
We all construct the world differently
What did Kelly believe about humans?
He believed that they are governed by their own internal process–the way they construe events in their worlds–that results from consequences of an external factor–social relations. He declared humans to be basically future-oriented, determined largely by their predictions of future events.
What are constructs?
Ways of construing events or “seeing the world” so that the future is anticipated
What, in Kelly’s terms, is personality?
It consists of an organized system of constructs that may be ranked as to importance
“Construct” became the foundation on which Kelly built his most basic theoretical framework or _____, a basic assumption that is the starting point for a theory.
Postulate
What is fundamental postulate?
It is the assumption that a person’s psychological processes are routed through various channels, or pathways, by the ways in which she or he anticipates events.
In a sense, ways of “seeing the world” form the channels that are direct toward the future.
The person is _____ along through life by predictions, as opposed to being _____ by unconscious impulses and drives or pricked into action by stimuli in the environment.
Pulled; pushed
What is a construction system?
An organization of many constructs with the more important, and often more abstract, at the top and the less important constructs at the bottom.
The constructs at the top of the construction system are called _____.
Superordinate
The constructs at the bottom of the construction system are called ______.
Subordinate
Constructs have what?
Two opposite poles
Ex: female-male, creative-non-creative, smart-dumb, rich-poor, etc.
The ______ ______ of the construct is the primary and principle end, like “good” in “good-bad” and “intelligent” in “intelligent-stupid.”
Emergent pole
The _______ ______ of the construct is the contrasting end, like “uneducated” in “educated-uneducated” and “not admired” in “admired-not admired.”
Implicit pole
How is Kelly similar to Jung?
He believed people see the world in terms of opposites.
What is the range of convenience?
The extent and breadth of the event-category to which a construct applies.
Ex: Trust-distruct is applicable to events involving people, such as someone who has conflict with his professor and experiences many events involving many different people, in which trust-distrust may be said to have a wide range of convenience
What is range of focus?
Refers to the events to which it is most readily applied.
Ex: Trust-distrust is most applicable to relations with friends and family, rather than to relations with casual acquaintances.
What does impermeable mean?
A reference to certain constructs that tend not to change in terms of range of convenience or place in the construction system.
What does commonality mean?
A reference to the sharing of constructs by two or more people whose experiences are similar.
What is individuality?
Refers to the differences among construction systems both in terms of the constructs comprising the system and in terms of how the constructs are organized.
Anxiety?
What a person experiences when his or her construction system does not apply to critical events.
Fear?
The experience one has when a new construct appears to be entering the system, and may become dominant.
Threat?
A realization of the possibility that a person’s entire construction system will be overhauled.
Guilt?
Will occur if your behavior does not correlate with your construction of self
Hostility?
When you have an inadequate construct of self that you try to force onto others
Ex: religious members clashing with CSULB students
Aggression?
An aggressive way of forcing your construct onto others
Ex: Trump supporters fighting with non-Trump supporters
How is the term constructive alternativism defined?
The assumption that a person’s present interpretations of her or his life situation are subject to revision and replacement.
True or false: construction systems never change
False. It cannot remain the same; it has to change with changes in the person’s life
What are tight constructs?
They yield unvarying predictability
What are loose constructs?
They yield varying predictability
What are the four different types of corollaries?
Individual, range, organizational, and experience corollaries
Individual corollary:
People differ in the types and number of constructs used.
Range corollary:
Each construct has a range of convenience (situation that the construct is useful for)–wide vs. narrow
Ex: good-bad; liberal-conservative
Organizational corollary:
Superordinate: wide range of convenience
Subordinate: focus of convenience
Experience corollary:
If the construct/hypothesis doesn’t work, we hold onto it. If the construct/hypothesis does work, we reject it
It determines whether a construct is kept, discarded, or modified
