Construct · 4 names · 6 citations
Different names. Different fields. One construct. One map.
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The degree of differentiation (recognising that an issue has several dimensions or legitimate viewpoints) and integration (spelling out how those dimensions connect) shown in a passage of discourse. Suedfeld and Tetlock scored it from 1 to 7 by content analysis, reading speeches, letters, and interviews rather than asking the author anything. The referent is the text, not the person, and the score is treated as state-like: the same leader's complexity falls under stress or time pressure and rises with accountability. What is measured here is language on the page, coded by the integrative complexity coding system, which is what sets this meaning apart from the trait measures below.[1][2]
The extent to which a person construes other people in a differentiated, multidimensional way rather than along one or two global dimensions. Bieri measured it in 1955 with a version of Kelly's Role Construct Repertory Grid: a respondent rates several acquaintances on a set of personal constructs, and the less those ratings collapse onto each other, the more cognitively complex the person is. This is a trait-like individual difference, a property of the perceiver carried across situations, not a number read off a single text. Because the instrument is the Rep grid and not content analysis, a cognitive complexity result does not translate into an integrative complexity result even though the underlying idea, differentiated construal, is nearly the same.[3]
The level of structure in how a person takes in and organises information, from concrete, single-rule thinking to abstract thinking that holds several rules and perspectives at once. Harvey, Hunt, and Schroder set out the conceptual systems account in 1961, and Schroder, Driver, and Streufert developed it in 1967 as information-processing structure, measured with the Paragraph Completion Test, in which a person writes to open-ended stems and the writing is scored for structural complexity. This is the trait ancestor of the integrative complexity coding system: the IC score borrowed the differentiation and integration idea from here but moved it from a written test of the person to content analysis of any text. Measured by the Paragraph Completion Test, it is again a different instrument, so its findings sit beside, not inside, the political psychology results.[4][5]
Complexity of thought as it shows up in how a manager acts in a demanding, fast-moving decision environment, rather than in a questionnaire or a single text. Streufert and Swezey drew this line together in 1986, assessing managerial and cognitive complexity through timed experimental simulations that record how many dimensions a person tracks and how they coordinate decisions over time. The object is behaviour in a task, so the measure is a simulation, not the Rep grid, the Paragraph Completion Test, or text coding. It shares the differentiation and integration vocabulary with the other three meanings while resting on yet another instrument, which is exactly why results do not move freely between them.[6]
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