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GEORGE KELLY • Individuals form their own unique mental frameworks or personal constructs to understand and interpret the world around them. • These constructs serve as tools for individuals to make sense of their observations and experiences. • Kelly proposed that the process of employing constructs is similar to how a scientist employs a theory. • Initially, we hypothesize that a specific construct is applicable to a certain event or situation. • Subsequently, we test this hypothesis by applying the construct and making predictions about the expected outcome. • If our predictions align with the actual results, we conclude that the construct is valuable in that particular context and retain it for future use.
Life Is a Construct • A construct is a person’s unique way of looking at life, an intellectual hypothesis devised to explain or interpret events. • constructive alternativism The idea that we are free to revise or replace our constructs with alternatives as needed.
Construction corollary — A person anticipates events by construing their replications. • Individual corollary — Persons differ from each other in their constructions of events. • Organization corollary — Each person characteristically evolves, for convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs. • Dichotomy corollary — A person's construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs. • Choice corollary — A person chooses for him- or herself that alternative in dichotomized construct through which is anticipated the greater possibility for extension and definition of the individual's system. • Range corollary — A construct is convenient for anticipation of a finite range of events only.
Experience corollary — A person's construction system varies as that person successively construes the replications of events. • Modulation corollary — The variation in a person's construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within whose ranges of convenience the variants lie. • Fragmentation corollary — A person may successively imply a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other. • Commonality corollary — To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, that person's psychological processes are similar to those of the other person. • Sociality corollary — To the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another, that person may play a role in a social process involving the other person.
Cognitive Complexity and Cognitive Simplicity Cognitive complexity A cognitive style or way of construing the environment characterized by the ability to perceive differences among people. Cognitive simplicity A cognitive style or way of construing the environment characterized by a relative inability to perceive differences among people.
