• ARTICLES, Special Section, XIVth Biennial Conference of the EPCA - 2018

“Live free or die”: Robert Frost and the choice corollary.

Green, D.

Keywords:
Choice corollary; personal construct theory; Robert Frost

Abstract:
The framing of Kelly’s Choice Corollary has been subjected to the criticism that it fails the crucial scientific test of falsifiability. It is hard to imagine any choice that a person might make that could not retrospectively be explained by some element of its premise. However personal construct theory, unlike many other therapeutic models in psychology, does at least attempt to understand how we make choices which strikes me as a fundamental human concern that should not be overlooked. Kelly proposed that one of the two criteria that people apply to their choices is whether a particular course of action will lead to an extension of their construct system by exploring new areas that are only partially understood. This paper obliquely examines the attraction of this decision-making principle by conducting a close reading of Robert Frost’s most celebrated poem “The Road Not Taken” which ends with the much-quoted lines “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I – took the one less travelled by. And that has made all the difference.” This powerful conclusion appears to celebrate just the qualities of individualism and adventure enshrined in the choice corollary. However a close reading of the whole poem indicates that Frost had a much more nuanced sense of how people make decisions and this subtler analysis is both consistent with a number of contemporary views of the psychology of choice, and less supportive of Kelly’s position than you might have expected.