Kelly Grid

The Kelly Grid is a tool for understanding how you think of people. Down the left hand side, write names of people. Pick any three, and think of an attribute which distinguishes one from the other two. Write this attribute at the top of the first column. (You can also label a column as attribute/opposite). Pick another group of three, and find an attribute for the second column. Repeat, until you have around six attributes. Then fill in the table, marking each person according to whether they posess this attribute. Now click the Analyse button.

Some possible people are

yourself, your mother, your father, your wife, a brother or sister, a brother or sister-in-law, an ex-girlfriend, a best friend, a distant friend, a neighbour, a politican, a film star

Also include some ideals of people

a threatening person, a successful person, a happy person, an ethical person, a rejecting person

Some comparisons which psychologists have found useful are

mother	father	sibling
you	partner	best friend
you	best friend	ex-friend
partner	ex-partner	best friend
rejecting person	threatening person	best friend
successful person	happy person	ethical person

The analysis plots the people you chose and draws a line for each attribute. You will probably see that the attributes cluster in groups. This reveals patterns in your thinking—constellations of ideas which you may not be consciously aware of. You will probably see that the people cluster in groups too, sometimes in surprising ways.

To interpret the figure, choose an attribute and look at its line. Rotate your head so the line is horizontal. Each person lies above or below a particular point along the line, and that point indicates how strongly that person possesses the attribute—the extremes of the bold part of the line indicate Yes and No answers for that attribute. (For some attributes the Yes–No line is very small. This means that the attribute is not well represented the screen: to see it properly you would need three dimensions.)

References. I came across this on BBC Radio 4, in the program All In the Mind. You can listen to the piece online. The mathematical analysis is based on principal component analysis. I have plotted a predictive biplot, as described in Biplots by Gower & Hand (1995). Further references to the Kelly Grid.

This has been tested on Internet Explorer 6 with Adobe SVG Viewer 3, and on Mozilla 1.2.1 (which lacks SVG support). You may have more success with an SVG-enabled Mozilla 1.3. Users of Windows XP who have not upgraded to Service Pack 1 should install an updated JVM. The matrix analysis uses JAMA.