Personality and Social Psychology: Lecture 1



Personality and Social Psychology: Lecture 5

George Kelly

According to Kelly, trait psychology tries to find a person’s place on the theorist’s personality dimension. Personal Construct Theory tries instead to see how each individual sees events on his or her own dimensions. So rather than locating the individual on his dimensions, Kelly’s hope was to discover the nature of an individual’s construct dimensions, in other words, the nature of a person’s understanding of the world. He saw people as scientists: just as scientists categorise, theorise, hypothesise and make predictions, so too do people. And it is these constructions and hypotheses that we need to understand – hence the name of his theory.

Kelly observed that most psychologists saw themselves as scientists who wanted to understand the world, including their own lives. But the subjects of their theories (that is other people) - unlike the theorists themselves – were generally seen as unaware of psychological forces that they can neither understand nor control. Kelly was unhappy with this discrepancy and so tried to treat all people as if they were scientists, people who were doing their best to understand a complicated world. So we see here a strong emphasis on the person’ s subjective world, which is typical of humanistic and phenomenological approaches.

Kelly stated his theory quite formally – as a fundamental postulate and 11 corollaries.

The fundamental postulate: A person’s processes are psychologically channelised by the ways in which they anticipate events.

This means that a person’s activities are guided by the constructs (ways) he or she uses to predict events. So we see not just an emphasis on the subjective world but on how the individual predicts and anticipates events. This fundamental postulate tells us that people are in business to understand their own nature and the nature of the world and to test out that understanding, and see its implications for the short-term and the long-term future. Everyone has a view of the world (a theory), with expectations (hypotheses) which are continually tested out - and modified - by their behaviour.

Some corollaries:

Individuality corollary: Persons differ from each other in their construction of events.

So when people are said to be similar it is not that they have the same traits, or have had the same experiences, but because they have placed the same interpretations on the experiences that they have had. Though people may well be similar in this sense, in the final analysis (according to this corollary) everyone is unique, as people’s understandings are all unique.

Organisation corollary

Each person characteristically evolves, for their convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs

What this means is that, like a good scientific theory, there are core constructs and less important ones (the former of course will be much harder to modify). This suggests that people’s understanding is hierarchically organised.

Dichotomy corollary

A person’s construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs

This suggests that it is useful to think about constructs as bi-polar: nasty v nice, intelligent v. stupid.

Experience corollary

A person’s construction system varies as they successively construe the replication of events.

This simply means that people continually develop their understanding of the world. A personal construct system is then, a theory that is being put to perpetual test. Predictions are sometimes correct, sometime wrong and sometimes turn out to be completely irrelevant. So if we expect to be loved and find that we are hated, all those understandings of ourselves (and others) which led us to expect to be loved become suspect and susceptible to change.

This may strike you as very mentalistic and it has been argued that Kelly’s approach only deals with thinking and not emotion. But he himself did not accept the distinction between cognition and emotion, which he saw as an unhelpful descendant of ancient distinctions between reason and passion and body v. mind. PCT tries to talk about people in a unitary language. So he describes what other theorists may consider as emotional states in terms of construct systems in a state of change.

For example, Anxiety is “awareness that the events with which one is confronted lie mostly outside the range of convenience of one’s construct system” (in other words, realising that we don’t really understand something very well – like sex for the chaste or death for most of us). Guilt is “the awareness of dislodgement of the self from one’s core role structure” – if we find ourselves doing things we would not expect to do – if we were the kind of person we thought we were – then we suffer from guilt. Hostility is “the continued effort to extort validational evidence in favour of a type of social prediction that has already been recognised as a failure”. In other words, when we can’t afford to be wrong (as we’d then have to abandon a very important way of looking at the world), but suspect that we are, we may act in hostile way so as to get the evidence we need. So if, for some reason, it was important to me to see some of my colleagues as malevolent (perhaps because that would explain why I had not got a desired promotion), I might act in a hostile way towards them – thereby providing evidence that they were, indeed, badly disposed toward me. And finally, Threat is “the awareness of an imminent comprehensive change in one’s core structures”. This simply says that we are threatened when our most important beliefs about the world are invalidated and the world appears to become chaotic.

The organisation and dichotomy corollaries suggest that people’s constructs are not chaotic and so can be investigated – which is usually done using the technique known as the repertory grid.

Repertory grids.

A rep grid is a way of getting individuals to tell you the coherent picture they have of say, lecturers. The initial task may be, if this were your aim, to ask a particular student to think of three lecturers and tell you some important way in which he or she sees two as being alike and thereby different from the third lecturer. So if the 3 lecturers were Janice, Cris and me, you might reply sex. With another set of three lecturers you might say lively v. boring, with another three you might say bright v. dim, with another 3 lecturers dogmatic v. open-minded. You can then take all of the lecturers and get the individual concerned to tell you where each stands in relation to each construct. You then have a grid with elements along one axis (in this case the elements are lecturing staff) and constructs along the other.

In its original form, this technique was called the role construct repertory grid. In this, the respondent is asked to name 20 or 30 people who occupy certain roles (e.g. person you admire, father etc.) and constructs are then elicited in the way just explained, using 3 elements at a time.

From this information, one can also derive what are called ‘Implication grids’. In these grids there are no elements but each construct is paired with every other construct to see whether one implies the other. One can find out from this what it means to the person to be, say, politician and what things would imply being a politician. Being a politician may mean being pompous, untrustworthy and being hard-working – but none of those things may imply being a politician.

One can also use a procedure called ‘laddering’ to discover the hierarchical organisation of an individual’s constructs. For each construct, the person is asked which pole they would like to be described by. Say that they say that they would rather be open-minded than dogmatic. You then ask why it is preferable, for them, to be open-minded. They may say that open-minded people learn quicker – this means that learn quicker v. learn slower is a another construct, super-ordinate to the first one. Then you do it again- they say that they’d rather be described as quick learners because quick learners get ahead in the world. So then ‘getting ahead in the world’ v. ‘being left behind’ is a super-ordinate construct. You can probably see that through this technique one is getting an insight into what is important, that is what are the core constructs for this person. You can probably also see that these may be very different indeed from one person to another. So starting with the open-minded v dogmatic pairing, we might have learnt that being open-minded was preferable because open-minded people discover more, and that discovering more was preferable because then you could help people better.

As we might expect, it turns out that super-ordinate constructs have more implications than sub-ordinate constructs and are more resistant to change

Though rep grids are the best known technique to emerge from Kelly’s theory, they are not the only one. Kelly apparently often insisted that he would prefer to be remembered for Kelly’s first principle. This was the statement that ‘if you don’t know what is wrong with a patient ask him, he may tell you’. From this Kelly invented the technique of person assessment he called ‘self-characterisation’. Here a person is asked

I want you to write a character sketch of (the person) just as if he were the principal character in a play. Write it as it might be written by a friend who knew him very intimately and very sympathetically. Be sure to write it in the third person. Start out by saying ‘Paul Webley is

Fransella applied PCT to stuttering. Now, given that a person is nothing more than a bundle of constructs people must stutter because they view their world in a particular way. Remember that a person’s aim to make the world as meaningful as possible. The more meaningful one particular way of behaving becomes, the more difficult it will become to change – so a life-long stutterer probably has a very elaborate system of constructs concerned with being a stutterer – and far fewer with being a fluent speaker. So in order to change being a fluent speaker must be made more meaningful for them.

Fransella achieved this, in a study of stutterers, by concentrating on their understanding of fluent speaking. Every fluent episode was discussed in great detail, and the stutterers were made to contrue it. Whereas in the past these episodes were simply understood as ‘I was not stuttering’, now they had to think about them in detail. By the end of the treatment 13 out or 17 had reduced their disfluences by half, and 7 of these by more than 80%. Their self-characterisations are also very revealing e.g.

Before treatment.

Smith is basically a worrier, which produces the attitude that things that go well can’t last. He is a serious person who was rather shy and something of an introvert in his youth. Today however, he has removed many evils of those attitudes. He worries constantly about the impression he gives other people and tries to please and be popular in all forms of social intercourse. He has a warm and human personality and although he regrets not having had a good education, he has largely educated himself. His stammer has prevented him from allowing his personality to develop to the full as a non-stammerer’s would, and he feels unequal in an unequal world

18 months later

Today Smith is a confident, self-sufficient person who through his own strong determination plus sympathetic external help has become a useful member of society. He is now perfectly capable of taking his place in this tough competitive world. His is now leading a busy active life and his life-long stammer that has dogged him has been largely overcome. People who meet him for the first time would find him mildly aggressive but always prepared to be interested in others’ problems.

Note that he began by seeing himself as at the shy end of a shy-sociable dimension but ended by seeing himself as at the aggressive end of an aggressive-submissive construct. Note also that those who had more implications for being a stutterer (that is, it was more meaningful for them) were less likely to become fluent.

Lynch (1995) applied the repertory grid technique for eliciting personal constructs about smoking with a group of 16-17 year old students. He used pictures of smoking situations as the elements in interviews with both smokers and non-smokers. The findings suggest that the failure of recent anti-smoking programmes that have been aimed at young people may have been inevitable. The usual assumption is that young people are driven predominantly by extrinsic factors but, according to Lynch, ‘Individuality’, rather than social and image constructs, appear to be of far greater significance to young smokers.

PCT was a very popular approach in the UK in the 60s, 70s and 80s but it is fair to say that the technique (role-rep grid) has had more impact on psychology than the theory. PCT remains popular in certain domains but is outside the mainstream. So if one searches for work on PCT you will find it in its own specialist journal (Journal of Constructivist Psych) and at its annual conferences, but not in the main Personality journals – which are dominated by trait approaches. However PCT is an important part of the modern radical constructivist movement, which draws on psychology, therapy, sociology and is an approach to social science in general see, for example



(the ‘Virtual faculty’ – with contributions by Gergen, Billig, Shotter etc)

and



which has an excellent set of links for 6 people who are seen as being crucial in the development of radical constructivism, including George Kelly.

The person-situation debate

The person-situation debate was sparked off by an influential book ‘Personality and Assessment’ by Walter Mischel in 1968, in which Mischel attacked the trait approach to personality. Mischel argued that ratings on traits (whether by the self or others) are simply not very good at predicting actual behaviour. He made four major claims:

• Little stability in most measured personality descriptions except the following: IQ, cognitive style, self-reported personality traits, behaviour in similar situations.

• People generally overestimate the importance of internal factors, under-estimate the importance of external factors. (Fundamental attribution error)

• There is poor predictive validity for global personality traits.

• That the situation has a major impact on people’s behaviour and so you need to look at Person-situation interactions

1. The first is fairly straightforward. This is simply saying that of all the various ways of measuring personality many show very little stability at all – intelligence (considered to be an aspect of personality does) and so do self-reported personality traits but many other methods (for example, projective techniques) do not.

2. The second is a bias that people are prone to. This is the Fundamental attribution error. This is the tendency of people to overestimate the role that internal dispositions (traits, attitudes) play in human behaviour and to under-estimate the role of external situational factors. The first demonstration was by Jones and Harris, who had students read debater’s speeches that either supported or attacked Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro. When the position taken was said to have been chosen by the debater, the students assumed that it reflected the person’s own attitude, which is fair enough. But what happened when the students were told that the debaters had been assigned the position? They still inferred pro-Castro feelings.. A more recent, and compelling example, is an experiment by Ross et al. They set up a simulated quiz game. Students were randomly assigned to play the role of questioner, some the role of contestant, and some the role of audience. The questioners had to make up difficult questions that would demonstrate their wealth of knowledge –just imagine that you were taking part in such a study and then were asked ‘where is Bishop Rock lighthouse?’or ‘what is the 7th book of the bible?’. Everyone knew that the questioner would have the advantage – but both contestants AND observers (but not the questioners themselves, who understand the impact of the situation) came to the conclusion that the questioners really were more knowledgeable than the contestants. In other words, they saw the behaviour (display of knowledge in this case) as reflecting an underlying trait and not a result of the situation the people were in.

3. Global personality traits aren’t that good at predicting behaviour. If you have a measure of e.g., conscientiousness, and you try to predict whether someone will act in a conscientious way –by, for example, looking at whether they read all the work set by a tutor – the correlation will usually be positive but not high (typically about .3)

4. For some of his examples of the impact of the situation, Mischel used data from a classic study by Hartshorne and May (1928-30). This is an enormous study published in 3 books (the best known being ‘Studies in deceit’) and involving 11,000 school children who took 33 different tests of altruism, self-control and honesty at home, in the classroom, in church and at play. Here are some examples of the techniques used to assess honesty and deception:

The duplicating technique: children were given paper and pencil tests of knowledge of a school subject – the papers were collected and a copy made of the answers. At a later session the papers were returned and each child was told to score his or her paper using an answer key provided. So by comparing changes in the answer booklet with the copy of the original booklet it was possible to identify cheating.

The improbably achievement technique: Here children were given a test where achievement over a certain level was almost certain to be an indicator of deception. So one test involving putting a dot in the middle of a series of circles on the blackboard with the eyes closed – doing much better than others is a good indication that the child had peeped.

Stealing: the children were given a box containing several puzzles. In each box was coin supposedly belonging to another puzzle. Each child returned their box anonymously but it was actually possible to check who had taken a coin.

What was found in this extremely large and intensive study? The behavioural measures inter-correlated with a low average of .20 and correlated with the teacher’s ratings about .30. This led Hartshorne and May to conclude that

“neither deceit nor its opposite honesty are unified character traits but rather specific functions of life situations. Most children will deceive in certain situations but not others. Lying, stealing and cheating as measured by the test situations used in this studies are only loosely related”.

Mischel re-analysed this data to show that if children took some of the tests in different settings (at Sunday School, at home) the test-retest correlations fell from .7 in the same setting to .4 in different settings.

This seems pretty damning and led some social psychologists to argue that personality traits are useless in predicting or understanding behaviour and should be abandoned. But is this reasonable? If there really is no consistency in behaviour why do most people believe that there is? Over the years, the extreme situationalist view has become less tenable as people have identified flaws in Mischel’s approach and shown that traits are predictive and most researchers now accept that both personality and the situation matter, though the stress that they put on each will vary.

So, Epstein (1983) for example argued that Mischel's analysis was flawed. Although traits may fail to predict single behaviours, traits are good at predicting aggregates of many behaviours. For example, someone who is conscientious will probably study for most exams. However, that person may not study for a particular exam because of an illness or because of a problem with a boy or girlfriend. Therefore, traits are not good at predicting single behaviours, but are good at predicting aggregates of behaviours.

In one study, Epstein, for instance, asked people to keep records every day for a month of behaviours that they engaged in. Then he looked at the consistency. When he computed a correlation between behaviours on the first and the last day he found this to be less than .3 – when he divided the month into odd and even days and computed a new correlation, it was .74. Similarly when Epstein correlated scores on personality scales with estimates of behaviour based on 14 days records he found a good correlation of .61.

If, for example, measures in the Harthorne and May study are combined into a battery to derive a composite score for deception, we get similar findings; this correlates about .5 or .6 with teacher’s ratings and with later batteries. We have to treat each instance of behaviour (in the separate tests) like separate items on a personality scale and then combine them.

The other line of argument that has emerged since Mischel’s critique of the trait approach is the importance of moderator variables. These are variables that influence or change the relationship between two other variables. Many trait theorists now maintain that certain moderator variables, such as self-awareness, can improve the relationship between measured traits and behaviour.

Two examples:

Bem & Allen (1974) attempted to tease out "highly consistent friendly" from "less consistent friendly" individuals – in other words, to tease out the effects of the trait "consistency" from the trait "friendliness". They then examined the predictiveness of trait "friendliness" in different situations.

They found that high friendliness among those who saw themselves as consistent predicted behaviour. High friendliness among those who saw themselves as less consistent did not predict behaviour.

Buss developed a measure of private self-consciousness (items such as ‘I reflect about myself a lot, I’m always trying to figure myself out). He showed that those high on this scale showed much higher correlations between their personality scales (which are, you must remember, self-reports) and their actual behaviour (in this case, this was the amount of shock given to a another person in an experiment several weeks later).

Most researchers now would accept an interactionist approach, which sees behaviour as the result of the continuous interplay between people and the situations they encounter. Interactionists argue that situational factors exert a strong influence on people’s behaviour, but that personality traits influence people’s choices of situations that they enter in the first place. This makes good sense and there is clear evidence of this: people who rate themselves as sociable spend more time in situations where there are other people and prefer to be in such situations. So in order to understand people’s behaviour we need to have knowledge of both the characteristics of the individual and the characteristics of the situation. This is the mainstream approach – a whole issue of the European Journal of Personality was devoted to person-situation interaction in 1999 (vol 13 no 5).

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