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Describe the Personal Constructs Theory - George Kelly.

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The cognitive approach to personality describes consistent behavior patterns of the way people process information. George Kelly was an early pioneer for this approach with his personal construct theory. Kelly maintained that we are motivated to make sense out of our worlds. He compared people to scientists, always striving for better predictions about what will happen to them.

Kelly described cognitive structures we use in regard as personal constructs. Kelly maintained that psychological problems stem from anxiety, which results from a person’s inability to predict events. Our construct systems are not static. They are confirmed or challenged every moment we are conscious. A person’s construct system represents the truth as they understand it – whatever ‘objective’ means in the world of personal feelings and choices. When we meet someone whose construct system is different from our own – especially if we do not like it, or think its wrong – we sometimes use words like prejudice or stereotype to convey our disagreement. We might try confronting them with opposing opinions or evidence, and get frustrated if we see them immunizing their constructs instead of adapting them. But we have to accept that their system has worked, more or less, for them so far and that if it is different from ours then that is a reflection of the fact that they’ve had different experiences, different reactions, and see different things as important.

People can and do live with a degree of internal inconsistency within their construct system. At the simplest level, many of us encounter this as small children when we hear an adult say” this hurts me more than it hurts you,” and wonder why, why under those circumstances, they don’t stop doing it. At the more complex level, we observe this when we encounter someone whose self-perception seems to be at odds with reality, who seems to present different faces in different circumstances. Most people live with a certain level of inconsistency which does them no harm, but when the distortions of judgment become too costly or inappropriate the person is likely to suffer some form of personal distress.

You do not have to have the same construct system as another in order to understand them; but you do have to be able to infer the other person’s construct system. Kelly introduced the Rep Test to measure individual differences in personal constructs.

Kavungya answered the question on May 8, 2019 at 11:35

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Describe the Personal Constructs Theory - George Kelly.

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