George Alexander Kelly (April 28, 1905 – March 6, 1967) was an American psychologist, therapist, educator and personality theorist.

[7][8][9] Early on, he was interested in social problems, and he went on to get his master's degree in sociology at the University of Kansas, where he wrote a thesis on workers' leisure activities.

In 1929, after receiving an exchange scholarship, he completed a Bachelor of Education degree at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland,[5] writing a thesis dealing with the prediction of teaching success.

[14][8][9] For some years before World War II, Kelly worked in school psychology, developing a program of traveling clinics which also served as a training ground for his students.

It was during this period that Kelly left behind this interest in psychoanalytic approach to human personality, because he said people were more troubled by natural disasters than any psychological issue, such as the libidinal forces.

[17][8][9] Under his guidance, OSU's graduate psychology training programs became some of the best in the United States, offering a unique blend of clinical skills and a strong commitment to scientific methodology.

[18] The Psychology of Personal Constructs was published in 1955 and achieved immediate international recognition, gaining him visiting appointments at various universities in the US as well as in Europe, the former Soviet Union, South America, the Caribbean, and Asia.

[21] In 1964, Kelly wrote a paper for the First Old Saybrook Conference, which has been renamed to Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP).

Kelly, unlike many people who would see this only as a sheer affectation, thought this was the expression of his real self and the behavior was authentic.

[5] George Kelly left OSU to take an endowed faculty position as the Mashulam and Judith Riklis Chair in Behavioral Science at Brandeis University in 1965.

[22][8][9] Kelly died on March 6, 1967, at the age of 61, just two years after accepting the Riklis Chair of Behavioral Science at Brandeis University.

[13] Kelly saw that current theories of personality were so loosely defined and difficult to test that in many clinical cases the observer contributed more to the diagnosis than the patient.

Kelly acknowledged that both the therapist and patient would each bring a unique set of constructs to bear in the consulting room.

Kelly's fundamental view of personality was that people are like naive scientists who see the world through a particular lens, based on their uniquely organized systems of construction, which they use to anticipate events.

[24] Personal construct theory explores the individual's map they form by coping with the psychological stresses of their lives.

[23][page needed] But because people are naive scientists, they sometimes employ systems for construing the world that are distorted by idiosyncratic experiences not applicable to their current social situation.

[27] On the other hand, Kelly's fundamental view of people as naive scientists was incorporated into most later-developed forms of cognitive-behavioral therapy that blossomed in the late 70s and early 80s, and into intersubjective psychoanalysis which leaned heavily on Kelly's phenomenological perspective and his notion of schematic processing of social information.

For this reason, it is an existential theory, regarding humankind as having a choice to reconstrue themselves, a concept Kelly referred to as constructive alternativism.

Kelly defined constructs as bipolar categories—the way two things are alike and different from a third—that people employ to understand the world.

Adaptive people are continually revising and updating their own constructs to match new information (or data) that they encounter in their experience.

Transitional periods in a person's life occur when they encounter a situation that changes their naive theory (or system of construction) of the way the world is ordered.

In 1955, George Kelly created an interactive grid known as the rep test based on his personal construct theory.

[13] Kelly's repertory grid test can be used in many different situations, from clinical psychology to marketing, due to its ability to apply constructs to any kind of event.