User:Minyi Ruan/sandbox/Corollaries of the theory of personal constructs

Corollaries of the theory of personal constructs

In George Alexander Kelly's book "The psychology of personal constructs (Vols. 1 and 2, 1955)", he assumes that a person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events. This assumption is what Kelly calls " Fundamental Postulate'. Base on the Fundamental Postulate of the Psychology of personal constructs, Kelly elaborated meanings of 11 corollaries.

• Construction Corollary: a person anticipates events by construing their replication.

People could distinguish similarities and difference among events in order to predict for a consequence. The construction corollary alike with common sense. For example, the weather in some regions were cold in the winter for the past twenty years, people can predict for the weather of the next year will be clod in the same region. The replication of the events (winter) have the similar properties (cold). The weather might not identical in every years, but they contained similarities.

• Individuality Corollary: person differ from each other in their construction of events.

Individual's interpretation for different events and concepts are unique. Thus, people do not perceive exactly the same experiences from the same event.

• Organization Corollary: each person characteristically evolves, for his convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs.

There might some similarities exist among people's personal construct, but their construction systems still differentiate from each other. People's concept can be developed as one's individual constructional system to anticipate events. Different events have connection between each other, thus different construction systems also are connected. Therefore, people's anticipation for event can be more accurate according to these connections.

• Dichotomy Corollary: a person's construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs.

An individual's personal construct system are dichotomous, which means that any constructs contain opposite poles. In order to make constructs to be meaningful, the two elements must consist of similarities and opposite, such as light versus dark, good versus bad.

• Choice Corollary: a person choose for himself that alternative n a dichotomized construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system.

People make choice on the basis of how they anticipate events, and those choices are between dichotomous alternatives. The choice corollary assumes that people choose those actions that are most likely to extend their future range of choice.

• Range Corollary: a construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only.

Certain construct could only anticipate for one specific event. The range corollary allowed Kelly to distinguish between a concept and a construct. A concept includes all elements having a common property, and it excludes those that do not have that property.

• Experience Corollary: a person's construction system varies as he successively construes the replications of events.

The Personal Construct Theory assumes that people look to future and make guesses about what will happen. Then, as events become revealed to them, they either validate their existing constructs or restructure these events to match their experience. The restructuring of events allows them to learn from their experiences. Experience consists of the successive construing of events. The events themselves do not constitute experience, it is the meaning they attach to them that changes their lives.

• Modulation Corollary: the variation in a person's construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within whose range of convenience the variants lie.

This corollary follows from and expands the experience corollary. It assumes that the extent to which people revise their constructs is related to the degree of permeability of their existing constructs. A constructs is permeable if new elements can be added to it. Impermeable or concrete constructs do not admit new elements.

• Fragmentation Corollary: a person may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other.

Constructs might either compatible or incompatible among different individuals. For example: two individuals could have a common habit in swimming, but their political opinions are opposite. As long as their point of view in political do not effect in their common habit, they still could maintain their friendship.

• Commonality Corollary: to the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by other, his psychological processes are similar to those of the other person.

Two people need not experience the same event or even similar events for their processes to be psychologically similar; they must merely construe their experiences in a similar fashion. Because people actively construe events by asking questions, forming hypotheses, drawing conclusions, and then asking more questions, different people with widely different experiences may construe events on very similar ways.

• Sociality Corollary: to the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person.

"People belong to the same cultural group, not merely because they behave alike, nor because they expect the same things of others, but especially because they construe their experience in the same way (Kelly, 1955, P.94)" People do not communicate with one another simply on the basis of common experiences or even similar constructions; they communicate because they construe the constructions of one another. In interpersonal relations , they not only observe the behavior of the other person; they also interpret what that behavior means to that person. In this Sociality Corollary, Kelly introduces the notion of role that refers to the pattern of behavior that result from a person's understanding of the constructs of other with whom that person is engaged in a task.