On the Importance of the Contrast Pole

 

Lack of Semantic Weight

There’s a very old piece of psycholinguistic research in which the authors took a series of adjectives, such as happy, interesting, well, etc., and used the techniques of semantic differential analysis to examine how much ‘weight’ was implied when the opposite word was expressed in a variety of ways, e.g. not happy, unhappy, and sad; not interesting, uninteresting, and boring, etc. They found that in all cases the ‘Not X’ or ‘Un X’ formulation carried less information than the formulation X-Y, where Y is the dictionary opposite. This is one reason why good Grid practitioners always ask for the contrast pole to be expressed in its own right, rather than using the emergent pole and tacking a negative on the front of it. You want a scale, a construct, where both poles carry equal weight.

What You Infer May Be Wrong

If you don’t elicit the contrast pole from the interviewee, you are left to infer it; or if a number of people’s constructs are to be combined or shared, then it is up to someone else to infer it. And it could be dead wrong.

For example, imagine that you are interviewing someone about her significant others and she produces one pole which she labels manic. Is this one end of a construct manic - depressive? Or is it one end of a construct manic - even-tempered? Her construct, which of course is personal to her and intended to reflect her experience, could be either, depending on how she experiences the other significant people in her life. If the fully-expressed construct is manic - depressive, then the even-tempered people in her life will be rated at the middle of the scale. If the fully-expressed construct is manic - even-tempered, then the even-tempered people in her life will be rated at the end of the scale.

Of course, you should take the opportunity during rating and feedback to explore the range of her construct of which one end is manic, and together you may want to re-write or split it (see the hint on Range of Convenience of constructs), but if you leave the contrast pole unexamined then you are not doing justice to the construct system.

Remember All Judgements Are Scalar

This was one of Kelly’s first principles: we do not define goodness without having a corresponding definition of evil, and so on. Yesterday, for example, I read the word determined use to describe Margaret Thatcher, Pope John XXIII, Nelson Mandela, and Hitler. Most people, I guess, would agree that the word applies to each in some sense; but Thatcher’s determination was rather different from the late Pope’s, and so on. We would only begin to know exactly what each writer meant by the word if we knew what, for each writer, was the contrast pole to determined. (Also, of course, what other constructs correlated with it).

If we describe one pole of the scale and leave the other blank, we don’t know what the scale is - not even the scale of which we have defined the one pole.

There Are Other Risks Too

It’s not implicit in the process, but I often observe that single-pole Grids are restricted to evaluative words and phrases only, and there is no requirement that every construct be evaluative; and if you present your elements in such a way that the ‘good’ pole is always the one to be elicited then when you start rating you run the risk of positional response bias in the answers.

Ask For the Contrast Pole

So, please don’t omit asking for the contrast pole (and note that it’s a contrast, not necessarily a dictionary opposite, and it’s much better to use the word ‘contrast’ when you’re asking). Otherwise, you will certainly lose valuable information and you may find yourself construing someone else’s construing and getting it wrong.

Prepared by Dr Valerie Stewart

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