Chapter 13 Constructivism

The constructivism theory talks about the idea that we all individually hold personal constructs that help us distinguish differences in people. In class we talked about how young children typically have the most simple constructs, and tend to categorize people in simple groups like old people and young people, or mean people and nice people. As we grow older we increase the amount of constructs that we categorize people in. So "the more personal construct-the more cognitively complex" we are. After reading the instructions in the book, I decided to do the Role Category Questionnaire. I found it very interesting to see how I look at people and have specific characteristics that I look for in people to separate them from others. I actually repeated the RCQ instructions for two different people to look for patterns in what I wrote. I definitely found similarities in the two. I found that I categorise the people that I cared for in categories such as loving, selfless, honest and caring. While I categorized people whom I did not care for in categories such as, selfish, ungrateful, and inconsiderate. I do however feel that after reading over my notes from class and doing the questionnaire, I have found this theory to be one of the more difficult theories to grasp on to. I'm not sure why, but I felt that I had to really focus more on the readings and class note to fully understand it.