Bandura and Social-Cognitive Theories of Personality: Comprehensive Study Guide
Core Tenets of Bandura’s Social Learning Theory
Cognitive Process in Social Context: Learning is not merely behavioral; it is a cognitive process that occurs within a social context.
Observational Learning (Modeling): This involves observing others, extracting information from those observations, and making decisions regarding the performance of that behavior.
Independence of Performance: Learning can occur without an observable change in behavior; one can learn through observation alone without immediate performance.
Vicarious Reinforcement: Learning results from observing both a behavior and the consequences (rewards or punishments) that follow that behavior for someone else.
Role of Reinforcement: While reinforcement plays a role in learning, it is not entirely responsible for the process.
Reciprocal Determinism: The learner is not a passive recipient. Instead, cognition, environment, and behavior all mutually influence one another.
Critique and Recall of Classical Behaviourism
Origins: Behaviorism evolved as a reaction against mentalistic and introspective approaches associated with figures like Wundt, Titchener, and Freud.
Scope: Early behaviorists aimed to limit psychology strictly to the study of observable behavior.
The "Blank Slate" (Tabula Rasa): While not all were strict advocates, they downplayed innate personality in favor of environmental influence. This view was notably favored by progressives and socialists.
Determinism: Old school behaviorists focused on external learning events. They largely rejected free will, viewing behavior as functionally determined by external forces rather than internal traits, drives, or temperaments.
Limitations and Critiques:
Complexity: Effective for specific issues (like phobias) but fails to account for the full complexity of subjective human experience.
Neglect of Biology and Cognition: It ignored innate human nature, genetics, and cognitive processes like beliefs or information processing.
Chomsky’s Critique: Noam Chomsky argued that behaviorist principles were insufficient to explain language acquisition, citing the "poverty of the stimulus" argument.
Agency: The model undermines personal agency, downplaying individual choice, autonomy, and self-determination.
Albert Bandura and the Social-Cognitive Definition of Personality
Background: Albert Bandura (–), of Stanford University since , is one of the most cited psychologists in history. He transitioned "Social-Learning Theory" into "Social-Cognitive Theory."
The Self-System: Defined as an active internal system of cognitive structures used to perceive, evaluate, and regulate behavior. It consists of interconnected beliefs, goals, and capabilities.
Personality Definition: Bandura views personality as coherent patterns of behavior and experience across similar situations.
Key Distinction: Unlike trait approaches, which look for stability across all situations (decontextualized traits), the social-cognitive perspective emphasizes the stability of responding to the same situation over time.
Human Agency and Free Will
Definition of Agency: "The human capability to exert influence over one’s functioning and the course of events by one’s actions" (Bandura, , p. ).
View of Human Nature: Bandura focused on humans (who possess free will) rather than the animal models used by early behaviorists.
Types of Agency:
Personal Agency: Exerting free will to change the environment for one’s own benefit.
Proxy Agency: Engaging other people to help change one’s circumstances.
Collective Agency: A group of people coming together for a common aim.
Cognitive Self-Guidance: Humans visualize futures to act on the present; they construct and evaluate alternative courses of action to reach valued outcomes and override environmental influences.
Four Aspects of Agency:
Intentionality: Forming plans for active decisions to engage in activities.
Forethought: The ability to anticipate the outcomes of actions.
Self-reactiveness: The ability to construct and regulate appropriate behaviors.
Self-reflectiveness: The ability to reflect upon and evaluate the soundness of one’s own cognitions and behaviors.
Reciprocal Determinism and Modelling
Dynamic System: Recognizes three mutually influencing factors:
B (Behavior): Can affect an individual’s cognition, emotions, and the environment.
P (Personal): Cognitive, emotional, and biological factors that affect environment and behavior.
E (Environment): Influences behavioral choices and personal factors.
Social Context: Bandura argued social context is critical to personality. One acquires behavior by observing others without needing to produce the behavior themselves to learn the consequences.
The Bobo Doll Experiment:
Demonstrated that kids learn aggressive responses through observation.
Showed that levels of aggression depend on whether models are rewarded or punished (vicarious reinforcement).
Proved modeling is not "blind imitation" but involves the cognitive processing of outcomes.
Modern Application: Social media influencers rewarded for antisocial behavior provide vicarious reinforcement for viewers.
The Process of Observational Learning
Attention: The person must attend to the model. Effectiveness depends on the model's competence and relevance to the observer's goals (e.g., one won't model Michael Jordan if they don't care about basketball).
Retention: The person must remember what was observed.
Motor Processes: The person must be able to physically perform the behavior.
Motivation: The person must want to reproduce the behavior based on the perceived consequences.
Outcome Expectancy and Self-Efficacy
Rotter's Formula for Behavior Potential (): .
(Behavior Potential): Likelihood of a behavior occurring.
(Expectancy): Subjective probability that a behavior leads to a specific outcome/reinforcement.
(Reinforcement Value): Desirability of the outcome.
Self-Efficacy: Defined by Bandura () as "belief in one’s capabilities to organise and execute the sources of action required to manage prospective situations."
Determines whether we try, how long we persist, and how results influence future behavior.
It is a dynamic, multifaceted belief system that varies across different activity domains—not a decontextualized global trait.
Healthy Personality: Primarily develops from high self-efficacy. It is self-reactive and self-reflective.
Learned Helplessness (Martin Seligman)
The Experiment: Dogs were placed in a shuttle box. Some were given inescapable electric shocks.
Findings: Between and , dogs were tested. Statistics include:
Approximately of dogs became helpless after unavoidable shock shocks.
Approximately of dogs showed helplessness even without previous shock in the experiment because they had prior escaped exposure to trauma.
Behavioral Profile: Helpless dogs "wilt," passively sink to the bottom, and adopt submissive postures, whereas non-helpless dogs resist handling.
Human Application: Leads to hopelessness and apathy. Even when "crying it out," babies show high stress hormones despite stopping the crying behavior. Depressed humans often show a similar profile: looking like they don't care but possessing elevated stress hormones.
Locus of Control and Attributional Style
Julian Rotter’s Locus of Control:
Internal: Belief that events are under one's control and one is responsible for outcomes.
External: Belief that events are outside of one's control.
Generalized vs. Specific: One can have an internal locus for health but an external one for politics.
The Three Dimensions of Attributional Style:
Internal vs. External: Is the cause about me ("I didn't know the material") or the situation ("The test was unfair")?
Stable vs. Unstable: Will the cause always be true ("I'm dumb") or can it change ("I didn't study enough this time")?
Global vs. Specific: Does it affect everything ("I'm bad at everything") or one area ("I'm bad at this one subject")?
Walter Mischel and the CAPS Model
Critique of Traits (): Mischel argued traits predict behavior poorly (typically or less than variance).
Strong vs. Weak Situations: Situations predict behavior when the situation is "strong" (e.g., Milgram or Zimbardo experiments); traits predict better when the situation is "weak."
CAPS (Cognitive-Affective Processing System): A framework integrating personality dispositions and processes.
Cognitive-Affective Units (CAUs):
Competencies and Self-Regulation: Plans and strategies (e.g., delay of gratification).
Encoding Strategies: Schemas and categories for the world (e.g., attributional style).
Expectancies and Beliefs: Outcome expectancies and self-efficacy.
Goals and Values: Short- and long-term objectives.
Affect: Emotions that actively shape cognition and behavior.
Behavioral Signatures: Patterns defined by "IF [situation], THEN [behavior]" logic. Example: A client is agreeable with friends but hostile with authority figures. The personality is the stable "If-Then" pattern, not a global trait label.
Delay of Gratification (The Marshmallow Test)
Reward Salience: Children struggle to wait when rewards are visible but can wait better when they are concealed.
Long-term Outcomes: Impulsive -year-olds were found as adults to be more stubborn, indecisive, less self-confident, and had lower success in health, marriage, and income.
Modelling Study (Bandura & Mischel, ): Children high or low in delay were exposed to models of the opposite behavior (live, symbolic, or no model).
Both groups altered their behavior toward the model’s behavior.
Effects were maintained for at least one month.
Modern Trends (Protzko, ): Despite expert predictions that kids are getting worse, delay of gratification times have actually increased over the past years by approximately of a standard deviation per decade.
Replication Challenges (Watts et al., ): Re-analysis suggested predictive power is reduced when controlling for SES and home environment, though others argue this "overcontrols" for factors inherent to the construct.