Chapter 19 Kelly: Psychology of Personal Constructs 593way that we anticipate events (Kelly, 1955). There can be no question, then,
that Kelly’s theory is essentially teleological.
Kelly emphasized conscious processes more than unconscious ones.
However, he did not stress conscious motivation because motivation plays
no part in personal construct theory. Kelly speaks of levels of cognitive
awareness. High levels of awareness refer to those psychological processes
that are easily symbolized in words and can be accurately expressed to
other people. Low-level processes are incompletely symbolized and are dif-
ficult or impossible to communicate.
Experiences can be at low levels of awareness for several reasons. First,
some constructs are preverbal because they were formed before a person
acquired meaningful language, and, hence, they are not capable of being
symbolized even to oneself. Second, some experiences are at a low level of
awareness because a person sees only similarities and fails to make mean-
ingful contrasts. For example, a person may construe all people as trustwor-
thy. However, the implicit pole of untrustworthiness is denied. Because the
person’s superordinate construction system is rigid, he or she fails to adopt
a realistic construct of trustworthy/untrustworthy and tends to see the actions
of others as completely trustworthy. Third, some subordinate constructs may
remain at a low level of awareness as superordinate constructs are changing.
For instance, even after a person realizes that not everyone is trustworthy,
the person may be reluctant to construe one particular individual as being
untrustworthy. This hesitation means that a subordinate construct has not yet
caught up to a superordinate one. Finally, because some events may lie
outside a person’s range of convenience, certain experiences do not become
part of that person’s construct system. For example, such involuntary pro-
cesses as heartbeat, blood circulation, eye blink, and digestion are ordinarily
outside one’s range of convenience; and one is usually not aware of them.
On the issue of biological versus social influences, Kelly was inclined more
toward the social. His sociality corollary assumes that, to some extent, we are
influenced by others and in turn have some impact on them. When we accu-
rately construe the constructions of another person, we may play a role in a
social process involving that other person. Kelly assumed that our interpretation
of the construction systems of important other people (such as parents, spouse,
and friends) may have some influence on our future constructions. Recall that,
in fixed-role therapy, clients adopt the identity of a fictitious person; and by try-
ing out that role in various social settings, they may experience some change
in their personal constructs. However, the actions of others do not mold their
behavior; rather, it is their interpretation of events that changes their behavior.
On the final dimension for a conception of humanity—uniqueness ver-
sus similarities—Kelly emphasized the uniqueness of personality. This
emphasis, however, was tempered by his commonality corollary, which
assumes that people from the same sociocultural background tend to have
had some of the same kinds of experience and therefore construe events
similarly. Nevertheless, Kelly held that our individual interpretations of events
are crucial and that no two persons ever have precisely the same personal
constructs.