Chapter 13: Constructivism

Constructivism is a theory that examines cognitive communication. The goal of this theory is to study the human mind, or, as researchers call it, the "black box". The main argument of this theory is that people make sense of the world through a set of constructs, and these constructs determine how a person will communicate.

A major aspect of this theory is the idea of "cognitive complexity", or the set of mental constructs a person has that enable him or her to more effectively read the subtle differences between different people. According to the theory, the more constructs a person has, the more cognitively complex they are in a given area. The focus of this theory is on personal constructs, which are constructs that humans use to view the world in terms of people.

An example of this theory at work could be when a person enters a classroom for the first time and does a quick visual survey of the class. The more cognitively complex a person is, the more constructs they will have for classifying the people in the classroom. They may start with the more obvious constructs-male vs. female, short vs. tall, etc. However, a more cognitively complex person will look a bit more closely and will most likely have a greater number of categories to place people in. In fact, they may have so many constructs that they find it difficult to easily categorize everyone in the class.