Personal constructs and personal characteristics.

An important issue in personality is the relationship between the life style of an individual, including his outlook, and his objective characteristics or characteristics of his situation. Certainly it would seem that the wayan individual chooses to construe his environment and his place in it should be related to his own characteristics. Thus, a handsome person might be expected to have quite a different view of the world than one who is homely. In his personality theory Kelly (2) made the "personal construct" the prime variable for the understanding of personality, but as the writer has pointed out before (4), the implications of personal constructs for behavior are only vaguely specified. Thus, if a given individual tends to construe people as "intelligent-unintelligent," we are likely to be uncertain why that particular characteristic is important to him and uncertain about the predictions which might be made to his own behavior, e.g., in intellectual tasks. The purpose of this paper is to present some findings relating three types of personal constructs to seemingly congruent personal characteristics, in the hope of shedding some light on the "dynamics" of personal constructs. Limitations on the study of personal constructs are that one cannot be certain that two individuals even when using the same verbal level are using the same construct. However, some evidence (3) suggests that constructs are at least minimally communicable by their labels and that one can assume some comparability in constructs of the same label. But it is not easy to find constructs common to a large proportion of a group, and for which other congruent information is available. In the group used here, student nurses, preliminary analyses suggested three "common" constructs, fortunately all very different from each other. These are (using the writer's summary labels): intelligent-unintelligent, anxious-nonanxious, and friendly-unfriendly.