Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) is a comprehensive framework for understanding individual psychological processes. It posits that people interpret events through unique, personal constructs that shape cognition and behavior.
George Kelly, an American psychologist, introduced the theory in the 1950’s. He was influenced by the prevailing movements in both American and European psychology, yet he proposed a distinctly unique approach to understanding personalities and individual differences.
Kelly avoided using the concept of the unconscious; instead, he postulated “levels of awareness” to explain why people behaved the way they did. He classified “construing” as the highest level and “preverbal” as the lowest degree of awareness.
At its core, Kelly’s personal construct theory was a challenge to the existing psychoanalytic and behavioral theories dominant in the USA and beyond. PCP therapy can be classified as an experiential subset of the constructivist school.
Fundamental Principals
One important element of personal construct psychology theory is that a person’s unique psychological processes are influenced by how they anticipate events. Kelly felt that expectation and prediction were the primary drivers of our minds. Kelly stated that “every man is, in his own particular way, a scientist.”
Humans are continuously developing and improving ideas and models about how the world works in order to predict future events. People begin doing this at birth (for example, an infant learns that if they cry, their mother will come to them) and refine their beliefs as they grow older.
Kelly claimed that every construct is bipolar, indicating how two things are similar (lying on the same pole) but different from a third, and that they can be expanded with new concepts. More recently, scholars have indicated that constructs do not have to be bipolar.
People develop theories — often stereotypes — about other people and attempt to control or impose their own views on others in order to better predict their conduct. All of these hypotheses are derived from a set of constructions.
A construct has two extreme points, such as “happy-sad,” and people tend to position things at either extreme or somewhere in the middle. Kelly explained that people’s minds are filled with these constructs at a low level of awareness.
Another element is constructive alternativism, the assertion that individuals have the capacity to reinterpret events in multiple ways. Because of this, PCP is an existential theory that holds that humanity has the freedom to reinterpret itself.
Personal construct psychology proposes that people use mental frameworks, or schemas, to interpret and predict events within their environment. These personal constructs are bipolar, meaning they consist of a dichotomy such as ‘happy-sad’ or ‘secure-insecure.’
Constructs can be applied to anything that individuals focus their attention on, and they also have a big influence on what they focus on. People can construe reality by creating various structures.
As a result, establishing a person’s system of constructions would go a long way toward understanding them, particularly their essential constructs, which represent their very strong and unchanging views as well as their self-concept.
Narrative and Hermeneutic Approaches
Narrative and hermeneutic methodologies within PCP highlight the storytelling nature of personal constructs. Practitioners employ these approaches to help clients articulate and reauthor their life narratives, viewing psychological distress through the lens of disrupted storylines.
This aligns closely with research within the George Kelly Society, which suggests that interpreting personal narratives is a key element in effective psychotherapy.
Assessment Techniques in Personal Construct Psychology
PCP utilizes various assessment methods to understand and interpret an individual’s unique cognitive frameworks. These techniques are instrumental in uncovering how people make sense of their experiences and anticipate future events.
Kelly supported a non-invasive, non-directive style of psychotherapy. Instead of having the therapist interpret the person’s psyche, which would be imposing the doctor’s constructs on the patient, the therapist should simply act as a facilitator for the patient to discover his or her own constructs.
The patient’s conduct is then primarily explained as methods of selectively observing the world, acting on it, and updating the construct system in order to increase predictability. Kelly developed the repertory grid interview technique to assist patients in identifying their constructions.
Role of Repertory Grid
The repertory grid, developed by George Kelly, is an interview technique that employs nonparametric factor analysis to derive an idiographic measure of personality. It provides data from which to draw conclusions about personality, but it is not a personality test in the traditional sense.
A grid consists of four parts:
- A topic: it is about some part of the person’s experience
- A set of elements, which are examples or instances of the topic. Working as a clinical psychologist, Kelly was interested in how his clients construed people in the roles they adopted towards the client, and so, originally, such terms as “my father”, “my mother”, “an admired friend,” and so forth were used. Since then, the grid has been employed in a considerably broader range of contexts (educational, occupational, and organizational), and any well-defined group of words, phrases, or even small behavioural vignettes can be used as components. For example, to assess how a person perceives the purchase of a car, a list of vehicles within that person’s price range may represent a set of elements.
- A set of constructs, fundamental terms that the client uses to make sense of the elements, and they are always expressed as a contrast. Thus the meaning of “good” depends on whether you intend to say “good versus poor”, as if you were construing a theatrical performance, or “good versus evil”, as if you were construing the moral or ontological status of some more fundamental experience.
- A set of ratings of elements on constructs. Each element is positioned between the two extremes of the construct using a 5- or 7-point rating scale system; this is done repeatedly for all the constructs that apply; and thus, its meaning to the client is modelled, and statistical analysis varying from simple counting, to more complex multivariate analysis of meaning, is made possible.
After conducting careful interviews to determine what the individual means by the words initially proposed, a 5-point rating system may be used to characterize the way in which a group of coworkers are viewed. For example, on the construct “keen and committed versus energies elsewhere,” a 1 would indicate that the left pole of the construct applies (“keen and committed”), and a 5 indicates that the right pole of the construct applies (“energies elsewhere”).
When asked to rank all of the elements, our interviewee might respond that Tom deserves a 2 (pretty keen and committed), Mary a 1 (extremely keen and committed), and Peter a 5 (his efforts are very much outside the workplace). The remaining elements (another five people, for example) are then graded using this construct.
People typically use a limited number of distinct constructs for any one issue, ranging from 6 to 16 when discussing their career or occupation, for example. The variety of people’s meaning structures stems from the numerous ways in which a limited number of constructions can be applied to specific parts.
The interpretation of data from a repertory grid, or other PCP assessment tools, is aimed at understanding how the constructs shape a person’s perception and experiences. The results can guide interventions across various applications in psychological research and practice.
Advancements and Applications
Personal construct psychology has grown to incorporate a mathematical construction of psychological space, providing a more precise understanding of individual differences and cognition. These advances in theory have enabled researchers and practitioners to derive more meaningful inferences from the personal constructs individuals use to interpret their experiences. Substantial achievements include:
The elaboration of assessment techniques that more accurately capture the complexities of personal construct systems.
The introduction of new frameworks for applying personal construct theories to understanding issues such as mental toughness, particularly in the context of sporting environments.
There is growing interest in PCP’s applications to organizational development, employee training and development, job analysis, job description, and evaluation.
Personal construct theory has had a formative influence on the field of sociology. Its emphasis on how individual perceptions shape one’s understanding of the world has led to a deeper exploration of societal constructs.
In family therapy, PCP is applied to understand the unique constructs each family member holds and how these influence family dynamics and communication. It supports the idea that therapy can help members reconstruct their perceptions to improve familial relationships.
References:
- Bannister, Donald; Fransella, Fay (1971) Inquiring man: the psychology of personal constructs. London; Dover, NH: Croom Helm. ISBN 978-0709939504
- Fransella, Fay, ed. (2005). The essential practitioner’s handbook of personal construct psychology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0470013236
- Gucciardi, D. and Gordon, S. 2008. Personal construct psychology and the research interview: the example of mental toughness in sport. Personal Construct Theory and Practice. 5: pp. 119-130 ISSN 1613-5091
- Kelly, George (1955) The psychology of personal constructs. London; New York: Routledge in association with the Centre for Personal Construct Psychology. ISBN 978-0415037990
- Kelly, George (1955). The repertory test. The psychology of personal constructs. Vol. 1. A theory of personality. New York: W. W. Norton & Company
- Kelly, George (1963) A Theory of Personality: The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN 9780393001525
- Riemann, Rainer (1990). The bipolarity of personal constructs. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology. 3 (2): 149–165. doi: 10.1080/10720539008412806
- Winter, David A. (September 2008). Cognitive behaviour therapy: from rationalism to constructivism? European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling. 10 (3): 221–229. doi: 10.1080/13642530802337959