SOCIOCULTURAL- Social cognitive theory | Quizlet

What is the social cognitive theory?

States that humans learn behaviour through observational learning: watching models and imitating their behaviour

What are the 4 cognitive factors of social cognitive learning? (PARM)

-Potential to reproduce the behaviour

- Attention to the model

-Retention of the behaviour of the model

-Motivation to replicate the behaviour.

What is Vicarious reinforcement?

Seeing something positive and learning it expecting no reward.

Self efficacy

One's belief in his or her own ability. Those with low levels of self-efficacy are less likely to imitate the behaviour of the model.

Bandura (1861) Aim

Investigate whether children could learn aggressive behaviour by watching the behaviour of adults

Bandura (1861) Procedure

- Matched-pair design

- Laboratory experiment

-Participants were 36 boys and 36 girls aged 37-69 months, tested individually

-They would then observe one male adult and one female adult.

- 3 major conditions: a control condition, a group exposed to an aggressive model, and a group exposed to a passive model.

- They would also see if children would imitate a same-sex or different-sex model.

- In the passive condition, the model played quietly with the blocks, ignoring Bobo.

-In the aggressive condition, the model played with Bobo and was aggressive both physically and verbally.

- The judges observed the children's behaviour through a one-way mirror at 5-second intervals.

- They recorded 3 measures of imitation that were similar to the model and 3 types of aggressive behaviour that were not imitations of the adult model.

Bandura (1861) Results

- Children who saw the aggressive model made more aggressive acts than children who saw the non-aggressive model.

- Boys also made more aggressive acts than girls.

- If the model had the same sex in the boy's condition, they showed more aggression.

- In the girl's condition, they showed more physical aggression if the model was male & more verbal aggression if the model was female.

Bandura (1861) Implications

- Validity for the social cognitive theory: Demonstrates how children could imitate the behaviour of the models who acted aggressively by simply observing them, supporting observational learning.

- It also supports the motivation factor because, as seen in the results, boys were more likely to show more aggression if the model was male because they identified with them, providing them with a sense of self-efficacy.

Bandura (1861) Evaluation

- High replicability as it was highly standarized. - Participants were pre-tested on their levels of aggression, removing any outliers from the experiment.

- Study lacks ecological validity because the setting and situation were highly controlled.

- No long term effects monitored because the researchers only observed children for a short time. It is unclear if the behaviour was temporary or permanent

- Sampling bias: Small sample, all children from Stanford. Findings cant easly be generalized.

Kimball (1986) Aim

investigate the role of television in the development of gender stereotypes in elementary school children.

Kimball (1986) Procedure

- 536 children in four different communities with different access to TV (no television, one station, and more than one station)

- Natural experiment

- Researchers measured the children's level of gender stereotyping using the Sex Role Differentiation (SRD) scale, which asks children to rate how appropriate or frequent certain behaviours are for boys and girls their age, as well as how often their mothers and fathers perform certain tasks.

- SRD was administered to all children in each of the 3 towns both before and 2 years after television was introduced to Notel.

- Control group data was obtained from a previous study which was carried out 8 months before the study began

Kimball (1986) Results

- Before the children had TV, they held equal gender attitudes than children who viewed TV regularly.

- After Notel obtained television, gender stereotyping increased significantly in boys and girls.

- At the end, there was no significant difference between gender stereotyping scores among the children from the towns.

Kimball (1986) Implications

- Demonstrates that exposure to television models led to an increase in gender stereotyping as children learn behaviours and attitudes similar to models they saw on TV.

- Attention to models and retention of observed behaviour can affect the behaviours of the observer.

Kimball (1986) Evaluation

- High ecological validity: natural experiment

- Difficult to control extraneous variables: difficult to determine if other factors affected the results such as attitudes from the parents, friends, or the community. Low internal validity.

- Very old: hard to generalize the study's findings to our nowadays society where the majority of the world has access to TV

- The data was anonymous, the researchers cannot see changes in the gender stereotypes of individual children over time.