Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionV. Learning Theories 18. Kelly: Psychology of
Personal Constructs© The McGraw−Hill^573
Companies, 2009Related Research
Even though George Kelly wrote only one seminal work (1955, 1991), his impact on
personality psychology is remarkable. His personal construct theory has generated a
sizable number of empirical investigations, including nearly 600 empirical studies on
his repertory test, which suggests that his theory has fared quite well in generating
research. Because he was among the first psychologists to emphasize cognitive
sets, such as schema, Kelly’s idea of personal constructs in a very real sense was
instrumental in forming the field of social cognition, one of the most influential
perspectives in social and personality psychology today. Social cognition examines
the cognitive and attitudinal bases of person perception, including schemas, biases,
stereotypes, and prejudiced behavior. Social schemas, for instance, are ordered men-
tal representations of the qualities of others and are considered to contain important
social information. Although many researchers in the field of social cognition use
conventional questionnaires, some have followed Kelly’s lead and use phenomeno-
logical or idiographic measures such as the Rep test or some modified version of it
(Neimeyer & Neimeyer, 1995). More recent applications of the Rep test methodol-
ogy, for instance, have analyzed the different construct systems of sexually abused
and non-abused individuals (Lewis-Harter, Erbes, & Hart, 2004).
In the following three sections, we review some research on gender as a per-
sonal construct, smoking and self-concept, and how personal constructs relate to Big
Five measures of personality.
Gender as a Personal Construct
Marcel Harper and Wilhelm Schoeman (2003) argued that although gender is per-
haps one of the most fundamental and universal schemas in person perception, not
all people are equal in the extent to which they organize their beliefs and attitudes
about others around gender. In other words, there are individual differences in the
degree to which people internalize cultural views of gender. Moreover, Harper
and Schoeman hypothesized that those who do use gender to organize their social
perceptions will do so in a more stereotypic fashion than those who do not regularly
use gender to organize social perceptions. “Gender thus becomes a primary means
of resolving social ambiguity” (Harper & Schoeman, 2003, p. 518). Lastly, these au-
thors predicted that the less information someone has about a person, the more likely
he or she will use stereotypic gender schemas to evaluate and perceive that person.
In other words, with well-known individuals, we should expect more complex and
less stereotypic attitudes.
In the Harper and Schoeman study, participants were mostly female students
from a university in South Africa. The version of the Rep test used by the researchers
required that participants say whether their person portraits were descriptive of
women, of men, of neither, or of both women and men. In the first stage of the Rep
test procedure, participants wrote down names of people who best represented one of
15 different role titles, such as “liked lecturer/teacher,” a person with whom they
worked, and “the most successful person known personally.” In the second stage of the
procedure, people who fit each role title were compared to each other in groups of
three, with two role titles being compared to a third. Finally, in the third stage of the
Chapter 18 Kelly: Psychology of Personal Constructs 567