Person as scientist
A person develops and tests constructs or patterns that acts a s hypotheses about the nature of things so that adequate predictions can be made like a scientist. If these patterns appear to fit our subsequent experience, we find them useful and hold on to them, if the pattern or construct does not help in adjusting in this world we seek to modify or change the construct in order to develop a better one. Just as scientists constructs are employed by people to make predictions about the future.Kelly's theory is cognitive because it stresses on the ways in which individuals perceive and interpret the events in their environment i.e. the ways in which attitudes, expectations and beliefs determine the way people construct the world.
Constructive Alternativism
Kelly's theory of personality is based on his philosophical position of constructive alternativism, the assumption that any one event is open to a variety of interpretations. There is no one valid or true way of interpreting one's behaviour.We are free to revise or replace interpretation of events. Reality is what one constructs it to be. There are always constructive alternatives open for consideration. An individual's perception of reality is always subject to interpretation and modification.
Personal Constructs
Kelly formulated the personal construct theory by focussing on psychological processes which enable a person to order and understand the events of his/her life. According to Kelly an individual in the course of growth and development comes to develop to certain expectations about events, things and behaviour of others. These are called personal constructs. They are generalized ways of anticipating the world. Kelly's primary interest was the manner in which we construct our reality by sorting people and events in our life into categories Kelly termed these categories as personal constructs. A construct is a category of thought by which an individual interprets his/her personal world of experience. Every person has his/her own pattern of preferred categories or personal constructs. By understanding an individual's constructs the rules he/she uses to assign events to categories and his/her hypotheses about the categories related to one another. Kelly believed that we can understand the individual's psychological world.Personal constructs like scientific constructs must have operational definitions or referents in order to understand the personal meaning of the construct. This is because the same event may be perceived or categorized in different ways by different individuals. An individual may not be aware of these personal constructs. But these broad guidelines guide the personality and behaviour of people, rather than evaluating alternative constructions according to whether or not they are true. Kelly preferred to examine the consequences of the perceptions in particular ways. According to Kelly personality development is an effort to arrive a set of integrated constructs, which are in tune with reality and stand confirmed and validated.
Fundamental Postulate and Corollaries
Kelly's theory is formally stated in terms of one fundamental postulate and eleven corollaries. The postulate stipulates that a person processes psychologically channelized by the ways in which she/he anticipates events. The corollaries explain how a construct system functions, changes and influences social interaction. These are construction individually, organization, dichotomy, choice, range, experience, modulation, fragmentation, communality and sociality.Basic Assumptions of Human Nature
Kelly's cognitive theory explicitly reflects Kelly's position related to basic assumptions of human nature. His theory shows a strong commitment to rationality, changeability, subjectively and unknownability, a moderate commitment to holism and environmentalism and a midposition on freedom-determinism.Each of the eleven corollaries focus on the following:
- Construction: A person anticipates events by constructing interpretation their replications. We must create constructs or ways in which to understand the event.
- Individually: Individuals differ from each other in their construction of events. No two people interpret events in the same way. Each one of us experience an event from our own subjective point of view. According to Kelly it is the subjective interpretation of an event rather than the event itself that is most important.
- Organization: Each person characteristically evolves for his own convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs. This indicates that persons organize their personal constructs hierarchically in which some constructs are more important and others are less important. People differ not only in number and kinds of constructs they use to view the world but also in the ways in which they organize their constructs.
- Dichotomy: A person's construction system is composed of dichotomous constructs. All personal constructs are inherently bipolar or dichotomous in nature. The cognitive process of observing similarities and differences leads to the formation of personal constructs. How people interpret and anticipate their experiences in terms of similarities and differences provides the basis for constructive alternativism.
- Choice: A person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system. Kelly believes that a person is free and able to choose from the various alternatives the construct that will be most useful to understand or clarify the present construct.
- Range: A construct is convenient for the anticipation of a certain range of events only. Each construct has a certain range of focus. A given construct may be a relevant or applicable for some events and not for others. All constructs have a limited range but scope of rangement vary from construct to construct. It may be broad for some people and others limit their constructs to a narrower scope.
- Experience: A person's construction system varies as he successively construces the replication of events. People change their interpretation of events in the light of later experience of the construct does not prove helpful in anticipating future events it is reformulated and changed. Such reconstruction forms the basis for learning.
- Modulation :This corollary specifies the condition under which changes occur in a construct system. "The variation in a person's construction system is limited permeability of the construct within whose range of convenience the variants lie". The extent to which a person's constructs may be modified or changed depends on the existing framework and the organization of the constructional system. The more permeable open the person's construct, the greater the possibility of change to occur within one's system. Concrete constructs due to their specificity and range are difficult to change.
- Fragmentation: A person may successfully employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other. Some people employ constructs that are incompatible with each other either when their constructs undergo change. Or when they are impermeable and concrete.
- Commonality: To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, his psychological processes are similar to the other person. Our ability to share and communicate with other people is based on the fact that we share similar personal constructs with them.
- Sociability: To the extent that one person construces the construction processes of another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person. Our ability to interact socially with other people entails understanding a broad range of their constructs and behaviour.
