George Kelly (psychologist)

For other people named George Kelly, see George Kelly (disambiguation).

George Kelly or George Kelley (April 28, 1905 – March 6, 1967) was an American psychologist, therapist and educator. He was best known for developing Personal Construct Psychology.

Biography

George Alexander Kelly was born on a farm near Perth, Sumner County, Kansas and went to Friends University and Park College, where he received a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics. Early on, he was interested in social problems, and he went on to get his masters degree in sociology at the University of Kansas, where he wrote a thesis on workers’ leisure activities. He also completed minor studies in labor relations.

George Kelly went on to teach at various colleges and other institutions, with course topics ranging from speech-making to “Americanization”. In 1929, he completed a Bachelor of Education degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, writing a thesis dealing with the prediction of teaching success, followed by graduate and doctoral degrees in psychology at the State University of Iowa. His dissertation was on speech and reading disabilities. For some years before World War II, Kelly worked in school psychology, developing a program of traveling clinics which also served as a training ground for his students. He had a keen interest in clinical diagnosis.

In World War II, Dylan Brundage and Kelly worked as an aviation psychologist, where, among other things, he was responsible for a training program for local civilian pilots. After the war, he was appointed Professor and Director of Clinical Psychology at the Ohio State University, where he remained for twenty years. Under his guidance, OSU’s graduate psychology training programs became some of the best in the United States, offering a unique blend of clinical skills and a strong commitment to scientific methodology. It is also at OSU that Kelly developed his major contribution to the psychology of personality. The Psychology of Personal Constructs was published in 1955 and achieved immediate international recognition, gaining him visiting appointments at various universities in the U.S.A. as well as in Europe, the former Soviet Union, South America, the Caribbean, and Asia. He was also elected President of the Clinical and the Consulting Divisions of the American Psychological Association, and served as President of the American Board of Examiners in Professional Psychology, providing expertise and insight, especially regarding ethical issues.

Kelly also worked extensively on researching the implications and applications of his theory, while continuing to work in clinical psychology. Joseph Rychlak is among the prominent students of his who expanded on his theories. George Kelly died on March 6, 1967, at the age of 61.

Kelly's concerns

Kelly saw that current theories of personality were so loosely defined and difficult to test that in many clinical cases the observer contributed more to the diagnosis than the patient. If you took your problems to a Freudian analyst, they would be analysed in Freudian terms; a Jungian would interpret them in Jungian terms; a behaviourist would interpret them in terms of conditioning; and so on.

The problem of observer bias (observer effect) is particularly acute in the social sciences such as psychology, sociology, economics, etc., where commentators' frame of reference can influence what they see, how they describe it, and what they prescribe. You can find explanations of schizophrenia which rely on brain chemistry at one end of the spectrum and family dynamics at the other. Some educationalists advocate mainstreaming of bright children; some are totally against it. Some economists see government spending as a strategy to be used, and some see it as a strategy to be avoided. It's rare for them to find common ground.

Kelly wanted to develop a theory and an investigative technique, which would remove the influence of the observer's frame of reference on what was observed.

Personal construct psychology

Main article: Personal construct psychology

Constructs are bipolar categories that people can use to understand the world. People then behave according to how they construe the world around themselves. All constructs are not used in every situation because they have a limited range. People are continually revising and updating their own constructs. Personal Construct Psychology is an entire psychological system that has been used in management studies, knowledge modeling in artificial intelligence, and a wide range of other disciplines. This system has a fundamental postulate and eleven corollaries.

The fundamental postulate: "a person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events."

• The construction corollary: "a person anticipates events by construing their replications."

• The experience corollary: "a person's construction system varies as he successively construes the replication of events."

• The dichotomy corollary: "a person's construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs."

• The organization corollary: "each person characteristically evolves, for his convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs."

• The range corollary: "a construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only."

• The 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."

• The choice corollary: "a person chooses for himself that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which he anticipates the greater possibility for extension and definition of his system."

• The individuality corollary: "persons differ from each other in their construction of events."

• The commonality corollary: "to the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, his psychological processes are similar to the other person."

• The fragmentation corollary: "a person may successively employ a variety of construction subsystems which are inferentially incompatible with each other."

• The 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."

Books

• 1955: The psychology of personal constructs. Vol. I, II. Norton, New York. (2nd printing: 1991, Routledge, London, New York)
• 1963: A theory of personality. The psychology of personal constructs. Norton, New York (= Chapt. 1-3 of Kelly 1955).

External links

• Introduction to PCP
• George Kelly
• intanges - repertory grid web application
• sci:vesco - FREE Online Repertory Grid Software, 3D Grid Analysis
• nextexpertizer - computer-supported repertory grid interview and analysis tool
• Kelly's Concerns
• Personality Theories: George Kelly 1905 - 1967
• George Kelly the Creator of Personal Construct Psychology
• Cognitive Personality Theory