Self‐Construct Systems and Interpersonal Congruence

Abstract

Personal Construct Theory (Kelly, 1955) provided a framework in which the congruence of social perceptions was examined Tnads of close acquaintances engaged in personality descnption procedures presented at two levels of abstraction (global and specific) Usmg a modification of Kelly's (1955) Role Construct Repertory Test (REP) gnd methodology, target persons in each tnad generated personally relevant self-constructs, contexts in which such self-constructs might be displayed, and actions which might be expressive of those self-constructs This resulted m an idiographic data base on which peers attempted to construe the target's personality m a vanety of contexts The relationships between several self-construct system properties (such as Meaningfulness and Prototypicality) and congruence (shared construing) were assessed I^ttems of correlational analyses indicated that the most meanmgful self-constructs (l e , those manifested in extreme form), as well as self-constructs exhibiting the least vanation across contexts, produced greater agreement among tnad members about the target's personality It was suggested that the study of self-peer congruence is feasible using idiographic, self-identified personality themes, explicit contextual information, and a systems perspective A prominent area of inquiry m personality theory and research concems the congmence (agreement or correspondence) among individuals regarding the perceptions of vanous types of psychological charactenstics Investigations of the congmence of such perceptions have been based on diverse sources of information (e g , self-reports, global ratings by This article is based upon the first author's doctoral dissertation The authors would like to thank