Lecture 17: Behaviourism and Social Learning (Chapter 14)

Learning

• change in behaviour as a function of experience

• things in present depend on what you learned in the past

• different types of learning:

• behaviourist theories

• social learning theories

Behaviourist Understandings of Learning

• Habituation

• Classical Conditioning

• Operant COnditioning

Habituation

• as you are repeatedly exposed to stimulus, your response to it dies down

• responses to a stimulus can continue, but the stimulus must change or increase in intensity

Hedonic Adaptation

• Demonic Treadmill: gains and losses in happiness are only temporary, humans quickly adapt to change

• study of lottery winners vs accident victims

Classical Conditioning

• pavlov and his dogs

• UR, US, CR, CS

• conditioning occurs when a neutral stimulus produces the same response as the first stimulus

• timing of association is important

• extinction

The S-R Theory of Personality

• S-R: Stimulus - Response

• John Watson, took ideas from Pavlov and applied to personality

• Personality is simply learning various responses to stimuli

• Everyone has an idiosyncratic learning history

• Each pattern of S-Rs is unique to the individual - creates personality!

Operant Conditioning

• Based on Thorndike's Law of Effect

• Skinner's puzzel box

• focus is on learning the consequences of behaviour

• response changes outcome

OC: Responses to Behaviour

Reinforcement: increases likelihood of future behaviour

• positive (provide reward)

• negative (take away punisher)

Punishment: decreases likelihood of future behaviour

• positive (provide punisher)

• negative (take away reward)

Critiques of Behaviourism

• ignores motivation, thought, and cognition

• focus on animal research

• ignores social processes that may be involved in learning

• organism is passive, when in actuality people choose their environments actively

Social Learning Theories

• Built off of behaviourism but

• focused on humans

• included social aspects of learning

• allowed for internal motivation and thought

• believed that humans could choose their environment

Bandura's Social Learning Theory

• Efficacy expectations:

• belief that you can perform behaviour

• if high self-efficacy: more likely to perform behaviour, engage in it longer, prepare more for it

• observational learning:

• learn from others

• observation

• vicarious reinforcement

• ex: bobo doll

Contributions of Learning Approach to Personality

• establishing psychology as an objective science

• recognition that behaviour depends on the environment and even the specific immediate situation