Cognitive Social Learning Theory: Mischel and Bandura

Mischel and Bandura: Cognitive Social Learning Theory

Emphasis on the process of learning and the relevance of cognition for behavior.

Traits in Cognitive Social Learning Theory: Mischel

Walter Mischel

  • Born in Vienna in 1930.
  • Family fled Europe from Nazi persecution.
  • Studied at the City College of New York.
  • Graduate work at Ohio State University.
  • Professorships at Stanford and Columbia.

The Trait Controversy: Mischel’s Challenge

The Consistency Paradox

  • “Highly generalized behavioral consistencies have not been demonstrated.”
  • Personality coefficient (r = .30): average relationship between self-report personality measures and behavior; little consistency across situations (e.g., conscientiousness and friendliness).
  • Discrepancy between intuition that people are consistent and empirical findings.
  • Behaviors are situation-specific.
  • Consistency is expected only if the same behavior is reinforced in a variety of situations.
  • If the same behavior in different situations produces different consequences, people who are honest in the classroom may cheat on taxes.
  • Consistency is expected only if the same behavior is reinforced or a person cannot discriminate.
  • Common sense (intuition): consistency.
  • Research evidence (empirical): little consistency.
  • Traits are summary labels.

The Situational Context of Behavior

  • Situational hedges: "Person does x when y." Example: "Johnny will hit back [behavior] when teased [situational hedge]."
  • Situations activate thoughts and emotions that were developed as a result of prior experience with that situation.

Cognitive Person Variables

Person variables concerned with how a person construes reality.

  • Person’s unique interpretation of environmental stimuli.
  • “Assessing the acquired meaning of stimuli is the core of social behavior assessment.”

Encoding Strategies and Personal Constructs

  • Personal constructs: trait terms people use to describe themselves and others.
  • Situational descriptions: descriptions of events (must assess individual meanings of stimuli).
  • Examples:
    • Trait terms used to describe themselves and other people: hard-working, passionate.
  • Prototypes: typical exemplars of "fuzzy" categories.
    • Personality prototypes: abstract representations of particular personality types (e.g., introvert).

Competencies

A person variable concerned with what a person is able to do; “to construct diverse behaviors under appropriate conditions.”

Expectancies

Internal subjective expectancies determine performance.

  • Behavior-outcome expectancies.
  • Stimulus-outcome expectancies.
  • Self-efficacy expectancies.
Behavior-Outcome Expectancies
  • If I study 3 hours, will I get an A?
  • If I run, will I catch the bus?
Stimulus-Outcome Expectancies
  • What will happen next?
  • Important for maintaining a person’s ongoing awareness of the environment.
Self-Efficacy Expectancies
  • Can I do it?
  • Internal/external locus of control (Julian Rotter).
  • Helplessness.
  • Mastery orientation (Dweck).

Subjective Stimulus Values

How much an outcome is valued.

  • Value of the reward.
  • Desirability of outcomes (given the particular individual’s goals or values).

Self-Regulatory Systems and Plans

  • Internal mechanism
  • Ways that a person works on complicated behavior
  • Setting goals, reward or criticize themselves, delay of gratification

Delay of Gratification

The ability to give up immediate gratification for larger, more distant rewards.

Mischel's research with children:

  • Visibility of reward.
  • Thinking about something else.
  • Modeling.
  • Ego control (stable over time).
  • Ego resiliency: the ability to modify one’s behavior according to the demands of the situation.
  • Hot “go” emotional system vs. cool “know” cognitive system.

Performance in Cognitive Social Learning Theory: Bandura

"The capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one’s life is the essence of humanness."

Albert Bandura

  • Born in Canada in 1925.
  • Undergraduate at the University of British Columbia.
  • Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the University of Iowa.
  • Professorship at Stanford.
  • President of the American Psychological Association in 1974.

Reciprocal Determinism

The interacting mutual influences of the person, the environment, and the behavior.

  • The environment is not only the cause of behavior but also an effect of behavior.
  • People choose situations differently.

Self-Regulation of Behavior: The Self-System

Self-system: Cognitive structures and subfunctions for perceiving, evaluating, and regulating behavior.

Self-Efficacy

Human agency: people act with intention, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness.

  • Self-Efficacy
  • Outcome expectations
  • Efficacy and Striving Toward Goals
  • Should be grounded in experience.
  • Unrealistically high-efficacy expectations.
  • Efficacy for undesirable behavior.
  • Physiological Correlates of Efficacy
    • Catecholamine secretion
    • Immune functioning

Processes Influencing Learning

Observational Learning and Modeling

Learning may occur without reinforcement

  • Vicarious learning: learning by observing others without being directly rewarded oneself.
  • Identification.
  • Modeling.
  • Power vs. status effects.
  • Modeling of Aggression
    • Filmed models
    • Learning is not always evident in performance

Therapy

Use learning principles; self-efficacy.

  • Treatment of phobias, etc.
  • Varies with behavioral domain.

The Person in the Social Environment

  • Collective efficacy helps us achieve difficult goals together.
  • Moral disengagement: failure to regulate one’s behavior to live up to high moral standards.
    • Cheating because “everyone is doing it.”
    • Being cruel without thinking of individual responsibility.