About PCP by Devi Jankowicz

1. Introduction

Personal Construct Theory (PCT), in psychology, a systematic account of the ways in which people construct explanations, whether in the role of philosopher and scientist, or as laypeople seeking to understand their daily experience. The power of the theory comes from regarding the person as an enquiring organism that survives, grows, and develops by constructing personal explanations. The importance of the theory lies in its basic assumption that there is no difference in principle between formal and informal or lay systems of explanation. Indeed, the theory accounts for itself.

PCT is not well established in academic psychology, being regarded as a minor personality theory. Many would argue that this is because its status as an epistemology—as a theory of knowledge and how knowledge is created—has been misunderstood, or simply not appreciated, by mainstream psychologists, whose thinking is dominated by the assumption that knowledge is developed by a process of discovery—an uncovering of “truths”. In contrast, PCT, in common with contemporary thinking in social constructivism, asserts that knowledge development involves a process of invention consistent with experience. PCT has wide generality and, within the generic rubric of Personal Construct Psychology (PCP), informs thinking in all the applied fields of clinical, educational, occupational, and consumer psychology.

2. History

PCT was expressed formally in 1955 by American clinical psychologist George Kelly as a single basic postulate and 11 corollaries, in a two-volume work, The Psychology of Personal Constructs. His thinking continues to dominate PCP, albeit posthumously. Beginning with a statement of the importance of anticipation in human life—“what is likely to happen next?”—it outlines the ways in which people recognize patterns in their personal experience, which they express in the form of constructs organized into individually unique systems of personal understanding. They amend these personal systems in the light of continuing experience. Effective social interaction then depends on the ability to appreciate one another’s construct system—(“I can put myself in your shoes”), and not on whether the two systems are similar—(“I think the same way as you do”).

The history of PCT is largely a history of PCP, as the theory was adopted as a radical innovation in psychology in the 1950s, leading to the formation of specialist centres of interest mainly in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia in the 1960s and the development of loose networks of like-minded researchers linked through biennial international conferences in the 1970s onwards. Italian and Spanish national interest groups, and small groups in Russia and the Scandinavian countries have added their own perspectives on a theory that currently has international status and impact.

3. Current Research

It is difficult to highlight particular fields of current importance without doing an injustice to others, given the generality of the theory. Clinical contributions include the understanding of psychological disorders as imbalance; educational work includes the study of the ways in which children develop their construct systems both in the classroom and outside; contributions to organizational psychology have examined culture and organizational values as systems of shared and contending construction. Nursing, family therapy, police work, sports training, new product development, market research, cross-cultural communication, and knowledge management are among the current fields in which the theory is applied.

4. The Repertory Grid

PCP has developed several ways of identifying and describing construct systems, the repertory grid being the most commonly used technique. Beginning with the notion that a construct consists of a distinction meaningful to the individual (“good versus evil”; “like me versus different from me”; “likely to arrive on time versus likely to be delayed by being distracted”—these are all constructs) and that individuals have their own, personal constructs, grid technique consists of the identification of the constructs a person uses in a given situation by asking them to systematically compare and contrast important aspects or elements of that situation.

A simple rating procedure then permits statistical analysis, which identifies what the person is thinking and how they typically think about a topic, resulting in a description of the construct system that has not been pre-determined, as so many other questionnaire and rating scale techniques are, by the investigator’s own concerns or ways of thinking about the situation. This makes the grid particularly useful in researching situations, in all of the fields listed above, where the way in which people make sense of that situation is particularly important.

Devi Jankowicz

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