Social Learning Theory

9 Key excerpts on "Social Learning Theory"

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  Learning Psychology NQF4 SB

  TVET FIRST

  • N Horn P Huygen(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Psychological situation We always have to remember that different people will interpret the same situation differently. We will interpret any situation from the point of view of our own values and belief systems, as well as experiences. The Theory of Social Learning subjective: affected by personal feelings, opinions or preferences Words & Terms It is people ’ s subjective interpretation of the environment, rather than an objective grouping of stimuli, that is meaningful to them and that determines how they behave. Think about it objective: expressing or dealing with facts or conditions without letting personal feelings, prejudices or interpretation influence your thoughts and behaviour Words & Terms 8 Topic 1: Module 1 1 .3 .2 Albert Bandura Albert Bandura is considered one of the leading authorities of the concept of social learning. Through studies he has undertaken he has shown that children learn many forms of behaviour by watching other people. Behaviours that are learnt include aggression, cooperation, social interaction and impulse control or the delay of gratification. For example, when children saw someone being punished for aggressive behaviour, they tended to display less aggressive behaviour. Also, children who saw a role model rewarded for aggressive behaviour, tended to display aggressive behaviour. Bandura named the process of social learning ‘ modelling ’ . There are four conditions that must be met for a person to model the behaviour of someone else successfully: Attention to the model: the observer must see the modelled • behaviour and the consequences of this behaviour for the behaviour to be learnt. Retention of details: in order for the observer to learn the • behaviour, he or she must be able to remember the modelled behaviour. Motor reproduction: the observer must be able to display the • modelled behaviour. The observer must have the necessary motor skills to imitate the action.

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  Personality

  Theory and Research

  • Daniel Cervone, Lawrence A. Pervin(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Social-cognitive theory explains that people can learn merely by observing the behaviors of others. The person being observed is called a model, and this observational learning process is also known as modeling. People’s cognitive capacities enable them to learn complex forms of behavior merely by observing a model performing these behaviors. As Bandura (1986) has detailed, people can form an internal mental representation of the behavior they have observed and then can draw upon that mental representation at a later time. Learning by modeling is evi- dent in innumerable domains of life. A child may learn language by observing parents and other people speaking. You may have learned some of the basic skills for driving (where to put your hands and feet, how to start the car, how to turn the wheel) merely by observing other drivers. People learn what types of behavior are acceptable and unacceptable in different social settings by observing the actions of others. This modeling process can be much more complex than simple imitation or mimicry. The notion of “imitation” generally implies the exact replication of a narrow response pattern. In modeling, however, people may learn general rules of behavior by observing others. They then can use those rules to self-direct a variety of types of behavior in the future. Bandura’s con- ceptualization of modeling also is narrower than the psychodynamic notion of identification. Identification implies an incorporation of broad patterns of behavior exhibited by a specific other individual. Modeling, in contrast, involves the acquisition of information through observation of others, without implying that the observer internalizes entire styles of action exhibited by the other individual. The individual who is observed in the process of observational learning (i.e., the model) need not be someone who is physically present. In contemporary society, much modeling occurs through the media.

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  Personality

  • Jerry Burger, , , , Burger(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Psychologists questioned the assertion that all human learning is the result of classical or operant conditioning. “ The prospects for survival would be slim indeed if one could learn only from the consequences Social Learning Theory 353 Copyright 2015 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. of trial and error, ” one psychologist wrote. “ One does not teach children to swim, adolescents to drive automobiles, and novice medical students to perform surgery by having them discover the requisite behavior from the consequences of their successes and failures ” (Bandura, 1986, p. 20). Psy-chologists also began to question whether behaviorism was too limited in the scope of its subject matter. Why couldn ’ t “ internal ” events like thoughts and attitudes be conditioned the same way as overt behaviors? For example, paranoid individuals who believe evil agents are out to get them might have been reinforced in the past for these beliefs. Thus began the transition from traditional behaviorism to a number of approaches known collectively as Social Learning Theory. One of the concepts introduced by social learning theorists is the notion of behavior-environment-behavior interactions (Staats, 1996). That is, not only does the environment influence our behavior, but that behavior then deter-mines the kind of environment we find ourselves in, which can then influence behavior, and so on. The way people treat you (environment) is partly the result of how you act (behavior). And, of course, how you act is partly a result of how people treat you.

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  Essential Personality

  • Donald Pennington(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As a result of dissatisfaction with the image of humankind projected by radical behaviourism, together with evidence suggesting that the study of mental events cannot be ignored, behaviourists included the study of mental processes (cognition) and regarded these as essential to explain human behaviour. It is to this we now turn.

  7.2 BANDURA’S COGNITIVE Social Learning Theory

  The prospects for survival would be slim indeed if one could only learn from the consequences of trial and error. One does not teach children to swim, adolescents to drive automobiles, and novice medical students to perform surgery by leaving them to discover the requisite behaviour from the consequences of their successes and failures. (Bandura, 1986: 20)

  The above quotation highlights a fundamental problem with operant conditioning explanations of behaviour: that account needs to be taken of the capacity of humans both to think and to plan how to behave. The quotation also, indirectly, refers to an important distinction that Bandura and Walters 1963) made between what people do (their actual behaviour) and what people learn about behaving. This distinction can be seen to be one between acquisition of behaviours (learning) and the performance of behaviours. Rewards and punishments may determine what people will do, but are not necessarily needed to explain what people learn.

  The social-cognitive learning theory of Bandura (1977b) takes account of how people think (their cognitions) and the social context to explain when and how people will behave. 7.2.1 Biographical sketch

  Albert Bandura was born in 1925 in a small farming area of Alberta, Canada. His parents were of Polish descent, and he was one of six children, last born into a family of five sisters. Bandura studied psychology for his degree at the University of British Columbia. He selected the University of Iowa to study and research for his PhD largely because of the Department of Psychology’s tradition in learning theory. Following this he qualified as a clinical psychologist in 1953. After a year practising as a clinical psychologist he took up a post at Stanford University in the United States of America. At Stanford he collaborated with Richard Walters, his first doctoral student, and worked in the area of delinquency and aggression. This started him on the path of developing Social Learning Theory, with particular emphasis on observational learning and the role of cognitions in determining behaviour. Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, with its application to clinical treatment, has become one of the most influential theories of learning, taking over from Skinner’s operant conditioning approach.

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  Theories of Development

  Concepts and Applications

  • William Crain(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 9

  Bandura’s Social Learning Theory

   

  BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

  The pioneering learning theorists usually developed their concepts by experimenting with animals in physical settings. They watched how animals ran through mazes, solved puzzle boxes, and learned to press levers in Skinner boxes. These situations were not social; there were no other animals present. Skinnerians and others then showed how the same principles apply to human learning in social contexts. Just as rats learn to press levers to get food, people learn to interact with others to obtain social rewards.

  In the 1960s, however, Albert Bandura argued that our learning in social situations goes beyond anything Skinner and most learning theorists described. In social settings, Bandura said, we learn a great deal through imitation, and imitation involves cognitive processes. We acquire considerable information just by observing models, mentally coding what we see.

  In the 1970s Bandura refined his ideas on observational learning and demonstrated the powerful effects models have on our behavior. Beginning in the 1980s he turned more attention to the ways our efforts are influenced by our beliefs in our capacities—our self-efficacy beliefs. Bandura’s lifetime of work occupies a central place in modern psychology.

  Bandura was born in 1925 in the tiny town of Mundare in the province of Alberta, Canada. His parents had emigrated to Mundare from Eastern Europe as teenagers and had converted a homestead into a farm, which they struggled to maintain against storms and droughts. As a boy Bandura pitched in when he could. Although his parents had no schooling, they valued education and instilled this value in Bandura. After attending a high school with only 20 students, Bandura enrolled in the University of British Columbia, working afternoons in a woodwork plant to help pay the cost (Bandura, 2006; Evans, 1989).

  Bandura enrolled in his first psychology class almost by chance. He was commuting to the college with a group of engineering and premed students who took early morning classes, and Bandura had a gap in his schedule. So he signed up for the psychology course and immediately became fascinated by the topic. He majored in it; and after earning his bachelor’s degree, he entered the clinical psychology graduate program at the University of Iowa. While he was there he became impressed by the work of Robert Sears and other pioneers of Social Learning Theory, and Bandura began thinking seriously about the role of models in shaping our lives (Bandura, 2006; Evans, 1989; Zimmerman & Schunk, 2003).

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  Personality

  Theory and Research

  • Daniel Cervone, Lawrence A. Pervin(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  In addition to observing others’ actions, people also observe the consequences others experience. Through the vicarious experience of observing consequences to others, people acquire valuable expectations about the world without going through the often- painful step of experiencing consequences first-hand. In the social-cognitive perspective, obser- vational learning can contribute to a wide range of personality structures: competencies, personal goals, standards of ethical and moral evaluation, and self-efficacy beliefs. 341 Social-Cognitive Theory of Growth and Development Finally, note also that social-cognitive theory is opposed to the idea that human development occurs in fixed stages (as was suggested by Freud). Bandura and Mischel viewed people as acquir- ing beliefs and skills gradually across the course of childhood and later development. They recog- nized that development occurs in life contexts, and that a person could be high functioning in one context (e.g., school learning) and low functioning in another (e.g., building social relationships). M A J O R C O N C E P T S Acquisition Behavioral signatures Cognitive–affective processing system (CAPS) Competencies Context specificity Delay of gratification Evaluative standards Expectancies Goals Microanalytic research Observational learning Perceived self-efficacy Performance Reciprocal determinism Self-distancing Self-evaluative reactions Self-regulation Vicarious conditioning R E V I E W 1. Social-cognitive theory centers its analyses of personality on uniquely human cognitive capacities. Thanks to their ability to think about themselves, their past, and their future, indi- viduals are seen to have the capacity to influence their own experiences and development. Since these thinking processes develop through interaction with the social environment, they are called social-cognitive.

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  Expectations and Actions

  Expectancy-Value Models in Psychology

  • Norman T. Feather(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  IV

  THE CONTEXT OF Social Learning Theory

  Passage contains an image

  8	Social Learning Theory

  Julian B. Rotter University of Connecticut

  ABSTRACT

  In 1954 the author published a Social Learning Theory of personality (SLT) that represented an attempt to integrate reinforcement theories and cognitive or field theories of behavior. As a personality theory, it included both a theory of how individual differences in stable behavior are acquired, generalized and changed (i.e., a process theory) and a descriptive system of individual differences, focusing on some of the dimensions on which individuals may differ.

  The range of convenience of such a theory clearly goes beyond problems traditionally considered personality problems and applies to some of the problems presented in fields such as human learning and performance, development, social psychology and the social sciences, psychopathology, and psychotherapy. A description of such applications has been presented by Rotter, Chance, and Phares (1972).

  In this chapter I shall attempt to describe briefly some of the basic principles of this theory and then to elaborate by applying them to four problem areas of special significance to this book. The four areas to be discussed are: (1) motivation, incentive and emotion; (2) beliefs, expressed social attitudes and social action; (3) attribution theory and defensive behavior; (4) the psychological situation and interactionism.

  SOME BASIC PRINCIPLES OF Social Learning Theory

  In SLT, four basic concepts are used in the prediction of behavior. These concepts are: behavior potential, expectancy, reinforcement value, and the psychological situation. In addition, somewhat broader concepts are utilized for problems involving more general behavioral predictions; i.e., those dealing with behavior over a period of time and those including a number of specific situations. These variables and their relationships may be conveniently stated in the formulas that follow. It should be remembered, however, that these formulas do not at this time imply any precise mathematical relationships. Although the relationship between expectancy and reinforcement value is probably a multiplicative one, there is insufficient systematic data at this point that would allow one to evolve any precise mathematical statement.

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  Personality

  • Jerry Burger(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  “One does not teach children to swim, adolescents to drive automobiles, and novice medical students to perform surgery by having them discover the requisite behavior from the consequences of their successes and failures” (Bandura, 1986, p. 20). Psychologists also began to question whether behaviorism was too limited in the scope of its subject matter. Why couldn’t “internal” events like thoughts and attitudes be conditioned the same way as overt behaviors? For example, paranoid individuals who believe evil agents are out to get them might have been reinforced in the past for these beliefs. Thus began the transition from traditional behaviorism to a number of approaches known collectively as Social Learning Theory. Among the concepts introduced by social learning theorists is behavior-environment- behavior interactions (Staats, 1996). That is, not only does the environment influence our behavior, but also that behavior then determines the kind of environment we find ourselves in, which can then influence behavior, and so on. The way people treat you (environment) is partly the result of how you act (behavior). And, of course, how you act is partly a result of how people treat you. Other social learning theorists point out that people often provide their own reinforcers. It is rewarding to live up to your internal standards or to reach a personal goal even if no one else knows about it. Social learning psychologists also helped to bridge traditional behaviorism and cognitive approaches to personality by incorporating into their theories a number of concepts once deemed unscientific by Watson. Among the most influential of these theorists was Julian Rotter (1954, 1982; Rotter, Chance, & Phares, 1972). Rotter argued that the causes of human behaviors are far more complex than those of lower animals, and he introduced several “unobservable” concepts to account for human behavior and personality. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved.

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  Theories of Human Learning

  Mrs Gribbin's Cat

  • Guy R. Lefrançois(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  (See Figure 10.1 for a summary of these four processes.) OPERANT CONDITIONING IN OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING ...................................................................................... Simply put, Skinner’s model of operant conditioning describes learning as an increase in the probability of occurrence of an operant (emitted response) as a function of reinforcement. As we saw, Bandura’s theory of social learning assumes that imitation is a type of emitted Symbolic coding Cognitive organization Motor rehearsal Retention processes Vicarious reinforcement Self- reinforcement External reinforcement Motivational processes Motor reproduction processes Physical capabilities Availability of component responses Self-observation of reproductions Accuracy feedback Modeling stimuli: Attentional processes Distinctiveness Affective valence Complexity Prevalence Functional value Observer characteristics: Sensory capacities Arousal level Perceptual set Past reinforcement Modeled events Matching performance Figure 10.1 The four processes involved in observational learning. If a behavior is to be imitated, it is important that the imitator attend to the behavior, remember its characteristics, be capable of reproducing it, and be motivated to do so. From A. Bandura, Social Learning Theory, © 1977, p. 23. Reprinted by permission of Pearson Education, Inc., New York, New York. 374 Social Learning behavior that results from observing a model and that is reinforced. Hence, imitative behaviors are learned in the same way as any operant. Imitative behaviors, explains Bandura, are extremely common. Similarities in the ways people dress, eat, walk, and talk, and differences between cultures, are testimony to the prevalence and the power of imitation. Imitation ranks high as an explanation for social learning because it provides a good explanation for complex learning.

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