George A. Kelly
George Alexander Kelly (born April 28, 1905 in Perth , Kansas , † March 6, 1967 ) was an American psychologist . His main work is the theory of personal constructs.
Life
Kelly was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman and grew up as an only child in simple, rural circumstances. He studied mathematics and physics and worked for a while as an aerospace engineer. Kelly later studied Education at the University of Edinburgh and is doing a PhD on language and reading difficulties in children.
From 1946 he held the chair of clinical psychology at Ohio State University for nearly 20 years and during this time worked a. a. helped to draw up a curriculum for clinical psychology. In Ohio, he set up a mobile counseling center during the recession. He often drove to see his "clients" himself for hours. At the same time Kelly was politically active and in 1956 and 1957 he was the president of the important department for clinical psychology of the American Psychological Association, successor to Carl Rogers .
From 1965 until his untimely death he worked at Brandeis University . He was married to Gladys Thompson from 1931, with whom he had two children (son and daughter).
plant
In 1955, Kelly published his two-volume, 1200-page major work The Psychology of Personal Constructs ( The Psychology of Personal Constructs ) . In contrast to the two most popular psychological paradigms of the time, the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and the behaviorism of Burrhus Frederic Skinner , in Kelly's view the psychologist does not stand above the client to be analyzed as a "knower" but on an equal footing with him. At best, he can try to understand the client's individual worldview. But there were also parallels between Kelly's basic assumptions and Freud's psychoanalysis, whose observations and clinical contributions he valued. The criticism was mainly about Freud's image of man as being controlled by instincts. Kelly is considered to be one of the first exponents of cognitivism . In the psychology of personal constructs , he anticipated the essential contents of the “ cognitive turn ” in psychology that took place much later . This “reversed” view of people shapes current psychological theories and models to this day.
Kelly's Theory of Personal Constructs
Kelly's construct theory forms the core of his image of man. “Man is a scientist” who “constructs” his world. A construct is a way of interpreting, evaluating and classifying experiences. He finds that experiences repeat themselves. The wealth of experience is structured or constructed by assigning similarities and opposites.
On the one hand, constructs are formed by terms that mutually determine their content. A complete construct consists of at least three elements, two of which denote a similarity, the third the opposite, e.g. B. "hardworking" - "determined" - "lazy". The content of a word like “determined” is not regarded as fixed; it changes e.g. B. in the construct "hardworking" - "restless" - "relaxed".
On the other hand, constructs can also be formed by terms with more complex content, e.g. B. “like my father” - “like my teacher” - “like my boss”. The word construct should also be understood in the broader sense of the English word: construct of ideas . Man's behavior depends on how he constructed his world. A claim to an absolute truth is not made.
Kelly differentiates between verbal and preverbal constructs. The latter would be called the unconscious by Freudians . He assumes that they are appropriated and effective before language learning, even if a person cannot put them into words.
A construct has a limited range of usefulness and is only valid for certain situations.
Kelly calls core constructs constructs that can only be changed with far-reaching consequences for the rest of the construct system . In contrast, peripheral constructs can be changed without major adjustments to the core structure. Within the construct system there are superordinate and subordinate constructs that are hierarchically dependent on one another.
In general, the system strives for non- contradiction (consistency). Because the constructs are related, a person's behavior results from the entire construct system rather than just a single construct. Changes to a sub-construct have a more or less effect on the entire system. Construct systems differ in their complexity and simplicity.
Humans strive to expand their construct system and increase its usefulness with the aim of being able to better anticipate future events in order to behave appropriately. New experiences bring new constructs that are incorporated into the system. The complexity of the system increases. In doing so, people try to escape the boredom of repetition and the fatalism of the inevitable: they experiment, that is, they may deliberately question their own constructs.
It is important that the construct system is neither too flexible nor too inflexible. If the system is overturned too quickly (“too permeable”) due to new experiences, the behavior is unstable. If, on the other hand, experiences contradicting the system can only change the constructs with difficulty (“too impermeable”), this can lead to inadequate adherence to inappropriate behavior. Expectations that are too rigid or too loose limit the efficiency of the construct system. Ultimately, excessive expansion or narrowing of the organization of the construct system can also lead to disruptions. According to Kelly, schizophrenics have no shortage of constructs, but rather wrong ones.
Suicide is an attempt to reduce the threat to the construct system. One escapes either the certainty that the construct system is no longer valid or the uncertainty whether it is still valid.
Hostility is explained by the fact that people try to adapt reality to their construct system instead of adapting their construct system to reality in order to enforce its validity.
In psychotherapy , new constructs are learned through role play (so-called fixed role therapy ). One behaves “as if” (Kelly's theory on this point is inspired by the philosophy of Hans Vaihinger ). The cause of work addiction, for example, can be a wrong construct for “hardworking”. The cure would then be to let the workaholic learn a new construct and act accordingly. In contrast to psychoanalysis, Kelly is not so interested in the cause or the history of the constructs in humans. Rather, he encourages him to try new constructs and watch what happens in order to correct his construct system - like a scientist.
Kelly assumes that humans are fundamentally active. The concept of motivation is superfluous in construct theory. People don't need any external impulses without which they would be inactive. "Instead, people come fresh into the psychological world, lively and combative". [Pervin]
Repertory Grid
On the basis of his Personal Construct Theory, Kelly developed the Role Construct Repertory Test ( Role Construct Selection Test , Grid for short; also called Repertory Grid , Grid Technique, RepGrid or Kelly Grid). The RepGrid is a scientifically based method to record the repertoire of constructs of a person. It combines the advantages of a standardized interview - the process and procedure are fixed - and the advantages of open-ended procedures, characterized, among other things, by the possibility of recording unknown and individually subjective assessments. The procedure is process-structured and, similar to a standardized interview, can generate interpersonal comparable data. The grid thus enables both idiographic investigations and the investigation of regularities in the sense of a nomothetic approach.
RepGrid processes work with a repertoire (“repertory”) of significant elements from a person's experience, such as roles (e.g. colleagues), groups (e.g. departments) but also situations (e.g. rituals), objects (e.g. products) and abstracts (e.g. brands). With the help of dichotomous description dimensions, the so-called constructs (e.g. good vs. bad or innovative vs. traditional), these elements are assigned individual properties by the interviewee. In addition, a quantitative evaluation takes place, so that at the end a grid (German: lattice, matrix) with numerical values is created. If all elements have been assessed on the basis of a construct pair, new elements are compared with one another in order to form a further construct pair. This process is repeated until the interviewee can no longer think of any new dimensions of distinction, i.e. That is, his repertoire of constructs for the given elements is exhausted. Due to the systematic comparison and the complexity arising in the course of the interview, a targeted, deliberate influence on the result is practically impossible. The repertory grid method is used to determine and evaluate subjective associations of meaning. In the sense of Kelly, this should enable an insight into the construct system of the individual. Humans describe their reality with conceptual abstractions (constructs) that have been shaped by their individual experiences. He scales them in a given matrix with regard to suitable elements that represent the scope of the investigation. The respondent thus depicts his or her individual, semantic and psychological space in the form of a grid filled with numbers.
The Repertory Grid was originally developed for clinical-therapeutic diagnostics. The individual construct systems of a patient should be recorded by the method in order to enable a better understanding. Against the background of current constructivist discussions in many areas of science, it is experiencing a renaissance. Kelly himself saw a much broader area of application for the various repertory grid forms.
Today's area of application is broad, with the central area of application still today being clinical psychology and research. With the advancing development of computer technology, however, it is possible to process larger amounts of data and survey samples with the aid of software (multigrid analysis or multiple grid analysis). This means that the method, whose potential has never been in question, has also become interesting for use in organization and management, in particular in the areas of organizational or personnel development , human resource due diligence and coaching or for optimizing physical and virtual teams. A modified version of the Repertory Grid is used to record value knowledge in organizations and to initiate organizational development processes.
Quote
"If you don't know what is going on in a person, then ask them, they will tell you"
literature
Primary
- George A. Kelly: The psychology of personal constructs . Vol. I, II. Norton, New York, 1955 (2nd edition: 1991, Routledge, London, New York).
- George A. Kelly: The Psychology of Personal Constructs . Junfermann-Verlag, Paderborn 1986 (somewhat bumpy translation of the first three chapters of the main work into German).
Secondary
- D. Bannister, F. Fransella: Inquiring man: The psychology of personal constructs. Croom Helm, London 1986.
- Lawrence A. Pervin: Personality Theories . Munich 2000 (including 40 pages on Kelly's views, comparisons with other theories and an evaluation).
- JW Scheer, A. Catina: Introduction to Repertory Grid Technique. Basics and methods . Vol. I, II. Huber, Göttingen, 1993.
- T. Rammsayer, H. Weber: Differential Psychology - Personality Theories . 2nd Edition. Hogrefe, Göttingen 2016. ISBN 978-3-8017-2717-8 .
- Astrid Schütz ; Martin Rüdiger; Katrin Rentzsch: Textbook Personality Psychology. Hogrefe Verlag, Bern 2016, ISBN 978-3-456-85592-9 , pp. 75–80.
Web links
- Literature by and about George A. Kelly in the catalog of the German National Library
- pcp-net
- George Kelly Society website
- International conference on Kelly's approach in business, management and market research: IC-MORe 2008 in Leipzig
- Biographical
Individual evidence
- ↑ M. Sader, H. Weber: Psychology of personality . Juventa, 1996.
- ↑ a b c Matthias Rosenberger: vademecum sci: vesco: Professional use of the repertory grid application sci: vesco . BoD - Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2014, ISBN 978-3-7357-1537-1 .
- ↑ T. Meynhardt: Valuable knowledge: What really moves organizations ( Memento of the original from July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Waxmann 2004.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kelly, George A. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Kelly, George Alexander |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American psychologist, professor of clinical psychology |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 28, 1905 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Perth , Kansas, USA |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 6, 1967 |