Note Details
- Stage: soil ✨
- Type: Concept
- Topics: psychology
Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) is a metatheory of personality and cognition that addresses the psychological reasons for actions. Developed by George Kelly, it holds that people constantly build and refine theories about how the world works in order to anticipate future events.
Core ideas:
- Personal constructs = schema, ways of seeing the world
- “Every man is, in his own particular way, a scientist” — Kelly
- Every construct is bipolar (e.g. “happy—sad”), specifying how two things are similar and different from a third
- People build theories about others and try to control or impose their constructs to better predict behavior
- Constructs operate at varying levels of awareness
- Determining a person’s system of constructs — especially their essential, unchangeable beliefs and self-construal — goes a long way toward understanding them