Kelly's Theory
This metaphor describes how Kelly believed we view the world, comparing our personal constructs to colored lenses.
What are "transparent patterns" (or tinted sunglasses)?
This corollary describes how we arrange constructs in a hierarchy with superordinate and subordinate levels.
What is the Organization Corollary?
This corollary states that no life event can be reproduced exactly, but recurring features emerge that we use to predict future events.
What is the Construction Corollary?
Skinner described humans as these two-word organisms, meaning there's nothing inside us that can explain behavior in scientific terms.
What are "empty organisms"?
This apparatus, named after Skinner, was used to study how food pellets reinforced bar-pressing behavior in rats.
What is the Skinner box (or operant-conditioning apparatus)?
Kelly said we function like these professionals who form hypotheses and test them against reality.
What are scientists?
This corollary explains why different people perceive the same event in completely different ways.
What is the Individuality Corollary?
This corollary states that every construct must have two mutually exclusive alternatives, making all constructs bipolar.
What is the Dichotomy Corollary?
This type of behavior is elicited by a specific stimulus and includes reflexes like knee jerks.
What is respondent behavior?
This schedule provides reinforcement after varying time intervals and is exemplified by fishing.
What is a variable interval schedule?
This is Kelly's term for the freedom we have to revise or replace our constructs with alternatives.
What is constructive alternativism?
This corollary explains that each construct has a limited spectrum of events or people to which it can be meaningfully applied.
What is the Range Corollary (or Range of Convenience)?
This corollary distinguishes between permeable constructs (open to revision) and impermeable constructs (rigid and unchangeable).
What is the Modulation Corollary?
This type of behavior is emitted rather than elicited and represents most human behavior.
What is operant behavior?
This technique involves reinforcing successive approximations toward a desired final behavior.
What is shaping?
"A person's psychological processes are directed by the ways in which he anticipates events" is this foundational principle.
What is the fundamental postulate?
This corollary explains how we can hold contradictory constructs within our system at subordinate levels.
What is the Fragmentation Corollary?
This corollary describes how we constantly test our constructs against reality and reformulate them if they don't predict well.
What is the Experience Corollary?
Skinner argued psychologists must restrict investigations to these: only what they can see, manipulate, and measure.
What are facts (or observable behaviors)?
This is the most powerful schedule for controlling behavior, based on an average number of responses that varies unpredictably.
What is a variable ratio schedule?
Kelly rejected these two dominant psychological approaches of his time because he believed they denied human agency.
What are behaviorism and psychoanalysis?
This corollary explains why people from the same culture tend to develop similar constructs.
What is the Commonality Corollary?
This corollary presents a choice between security (familiar, low-risk) and adventure (new, higher-risk experiences).
What is the Choice Corollary?
In Pavlov's experiments, a conditioned response cannot be established in this condition, and will not be maintained without it.
What is the absence of reinforcement (or what is reinforcement)?
In this self-control technique, you deliberately overdo a behavior until it becomes disgusting, like chain-smoking.
What is self-administered satiation?
This corollary states that to successfully interact with others, we must construe the other person's constructs.
What is the Sociality Corollary?