Construct Comprehensiveness and Cognitive Complexity

Abstract

Personal construct theory distinguishes between incidental and comprehensive constructs; in the interpersonal domain role-related constructs can be seen as relatively incidental as compared to abstract, dispositional constructs. This paper presents a grid measure of construct comprehensiveness which assesses the degree to which a perceiver employs his constructs incidentally (in a role-restricted manner) or comprehensively (across persons regardless of role category). Since developmentally advanced perceivers characteristically use more abstract (and thus, more comprehensive) constructs, it was hypothesized that comprehensiveness would be positively related to cognitive complexity. Significant positive correlations between comprehensiveness and cognitive complexity (.39, .48, .55) were obtained in three groups of subjects ( ns = 21, 31, 18).