Personal Construct Psychology

The theory is set out in his major work as a series of formal postulates and corollaries, but its essence is that personal identity is defined by the way we construe or “understand” our personal worlds. It is therefore a phenomenological approach, rather than a positivist one. All action and thinking is undertaken, PCP maintains, in a “scientific” manner. This basically means trying things out to see whether they work: our “constructs” or ways of making sense of the world, are not necessarily conscious and articulate, but may be inferred from behaviour. Kelly does not refer to learning at all, but to changes in constructs over time — but this is principally because the process of learning is so ubiquitous in the system.

Its major tool is the “Repertory Grid”, which is an amazingly ingenious and simple idiographic device to explore how people experience their world. It is a table in which, apart from the outer two columns, the other columns are headed by the names of objects or people (traditionally up to 21 of them). These names are also written on cards, which the tester shows to the subject in groups of three, always asking the same question: “How are two of these similar and the third one different?”  

The answer constitutes a “construct”, one of the dimensions along which the subject divides up her or his world. Some constructs, such as “male” and “female” (when applied to people) are too commonplace to be of much interest (although the question why they matter in this particular case may well be interesting), but it is the personal constructs which say a lot about the person. If, for example, the names (or “elements”) were cars, then the “male-female” construct might be much more revealing. There are conventions for keeping track of the constructs. When the grid is complete, there are several ways of rating or ranking all of the elements against all the constructs, so as to permit sophisticated analysis of core constructs and underlying factors (see Bannister and Mair, 1968) and of course there are programs which will do this for you.

Constructs do not have to be dictionary opposites: “Unselfish” might be a more meaningful opposite to “Mean”, for a given subject, than “Generous”.

The number of constructs generated before the subject begins to repeat them can be revealing. 24—30 is about the norm. People with obsessional traits (“one-track minds”) may generate far fewer: schizophrenics far more. The tester can deliberately deal combinations of the cards to test hypotheses, or get the subject to rank all the items from one pole to another: the resulting scores are amenable to statistical processing to get at the major construct families. Or the tester can ask “why?” the subject has developed a construct: the resulting explanation gets at the “superordinate” constructs, which are hierarchically organised.

Personal construct theory gives one of the richest possible accounts of a person's cognitive processes, and has been developed as a tool in “conversational" models of learning. It is however, cumbersome to use with groups of students.

• PCP is psychological: i.e. it’s not about the brain, or culture, but the mind: it is quite clear about its level of analysis and its “range of convenience” [Back]

• “Channelized”: other psychological theories see the person (or organism, indeed), as a static entity, requiring some other agency to prod it into action. They postulate “needs”, or “drives” for this purpose. PCP rejects this: a person is seen as a process, always making efforts to understand and always acting on and in the world. Hence the ubiquity of the assumption of learning and the lack of need for a separate theory. [Back]

• “Anticipates”: PCP is future-oriented. The person is only a product of memory and learning insofar as she makes use of these in her construct system. She is a scientist in formulating hypotheses (her constructs) about the world she perceives, and testing them by acting on them. [Back]