590 Part VI Learning-Cognitive Theories
self-identified feminists who were diverse in age, gender, race/ethnicity, religious
affiliation, sexual orientation, and life experiences. Participants in the intervention
group also participated in an activity that encouraged learning about this diversity
(they played 20 questions to find out who was a feminist on the panel, to eventually
discover that all panelists were). Results showed the intervention was effective, with
students in the intervention group showing a reduced level of threat and an increased
degree of feminist identification afterwards compared to the control group. Moradi
and colleagues’ work represents exciting ways that Kelly’s personality theory may be
applied to change internalized culturally prejudiced construals, and to encourage iden-
tification with social justice frameworks that move toward a more equitable society.Personal Constructs and the Big Five
Researchers have begun investigating the connections between Kelly’s personal
constructs and the Big Five traits (Chapter 13). The Big Five traits (neuroticism,
extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness) have received a great
deal of attention in modern personality research. Kelly’s personal constructs have
a moderate amount of attention, but not to the same extent as the Big Five model.
Not all personality psychologists agree with this disproportionate allocation of
research and the value of each approach. James Grice and colleagues, for example,
have directly compared Kelly’s personal construct theory with the Big Five (Grice,
2004; Grice, Jackson, & McDaniel, 2006).
These two approaches to personality are quite different, and it is worth highlight-
ing the importance of this comparison. The list of the Big Five traits was created by
essentially boiling down all the thousands of ways people describe one another into a
shorter more manageable list that captured the most common themes. It seeks to
describe everyone along the same continuum. Kelly’s repertory grid approach, con-
versely, seeks to capture the uniqueness of individuals. Uniqueness is hard to capture
in the Big Five because everybody is described along just five dimensions, but in the
repertory grid the rater essentially creates his or her own continuum on which to
describe people. For example, as discussed earlier in this chapter, the first continuum
described on the sample repertory grid in Figure 19.2 is shyness-confidence, so clearly
for the person completing the repertory grid shyness-confidence is an important descrip-
tor, but it is not a descriptor that is directly captured by many measures of the Big Five.
The research by James Grice (Grice, 2004; Grice et al., 2006) essentially
sought to determine just how good the repertory grid approach was at capturing
uniqueness compared to the Big Five. To do this, Grice (2004) had participants
complete a modified version of Kelly’s repertory grid and a standard self-report
measure of the Big Five. Participants rated both themselves and people they knew
using the repertory grid and the Big Five measure. Using complex statistical pro-
cedures, the researchers were able to measure the amount of overlap in participants’
repertory grid ratings and Big Five scores.
What they found was rather stunning: There was only about 50% overlap
(Grice, 2004; Grice et al., 2006). This means that the repertory grid was capturing
aspects of people the Big Five was not and that the Big Five was capturing aspects
the repertory grid was not. Some of the unique aspects captured by the repertory
grid were body type, ethnicity, wealth, smoker status, and political affiliation