Kelly: Cognitive Approaches

Specialist theory

George Kelly was one of the first cognitive theorists.

He was highly critical of popular personality theories and found great difficulty with key researchers such as Freud.

The basis of Kelly's approach to understanding personality was that individual differences were the result of how we interpret and predict the events that affect us.

These individual differences he called 'personal constructs'.

Our 'constructs' are our way of gathering information from everything we experience in the world around us, interpreting what we experience and then how we develop hypotheses from this input and interpretation.

In essence, we are in a continuous cycle of taking information in, developing hypotheses about people and then testing these out in our world.

From these tests we all get our own individual results.  Whether these results are 'right' or not does not matter, what matters is that these drive the development of the way we interact with the world.

Kelly saw this way of interacting as 'our personality'.

The Fundamental Postulate

Kelly developed an idea he called the Fundamental Postulate or Personal Construct Theory.

This is a wider theory than just personality study but encompasses personality.

This states that a person's thinking processes are psychologically channelled by the ways in which he/she anticipates events.

In simple terms, based on our interpretation of past events, we act in a manner consistent with how we expect the world to be.

A simple example would be if we interpret someone as unhelpful and selfish based on past events, we may well choose to avoid dealing with them in the future!

An Outline

Kelly organised his theory into eleven corollaries, that together help explain how we interpret information and see things differently.  It also influences our perceptions of others.

Kelly organised his theory in a logical fashion that many find helpful but others criticise as being overly simplistic.

Join and learn the key points of Kelly's research and build on your understanding of personality and how it drives performance