Lecture 7

Social Learning Theory

by Albert Bandura

Biography
Albert Bandura was born December 4, 1925, in the small town of Mundare in northern
Alberta, Canada.

He was educated in a small elementary school and high school in one, with minimal
resources, yet a remarkable success rate.

After high school, he worked for one summer filling holes on the Alaska Highway in
the Yukon
He received his bachelors degree in Psychology from the University of British
Columbia in 1949.
He went on to the University of Iowa, where he received his Ph.D. in 1952.
It was there that he came under the influence of the behaviorist tradition and learning
theory.
While at Iowa, he met Virginia Varns, an instructor in the nursing school.
They married and later had two daughters.
After graduating, he took a postdoctoral position at the Wichita Guidance Center in
Wichita, Kansas.
In 1953, he started teaching at Stanford University.
While there, he collaborated with his first graduate student, Richard Walters, resulting
in their first book, Adolescent Aggression, in 1959.
Bandura was president of the APA in 1973, and received the APA’s Award for
Distinguished Scientific Contributions in 1980.
View of human nature
Bandura emphases on experimental methods, focuses on variables we can observe,
measure, and manipulate, and avoids whatever is subjective, internal, and
unavailable like the mental.
In the experimental method, the standard procedure is to manipulate one variable, and
then measure its effects on another.
This narrows down to a theory of personality that says that one’s environment causes
one’s behavior.

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Meaning man is mechanistic and that he is the producer and the product of his
environment.
Bandura said we are not only influenced by our surrounding, we have the capacity to
affect our environment.
He labeled this concept reciprocal determinism:
The world and a person’s behavior cause each other.

He began to look at personality as an interaction among three “things:” the

environment, behavior, and the person’s psychological processes (Bandura, 1977).
The three came to be named Triadic Reciprocal Causation of Bandura’s Social
Cognitive Theory
Personality is influenced by:

These psychological processes consist of our ability to entertain images in our minds,
and language.
Observational learning, or modeling
His most famous experiment was the 1961 Bobo doll study
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmBqwWlJg8U).
In the experiment, he made a film in which a woman was shown beating up a Bobo
doll and shouting aggressive words (Banbura,1973).
The film was then shown to a group of children. Afterwards, the children were
allowed to play in a room that held a Bobo doll.
The children immediately began to beat the doll, imitating the actions and words of
the woman in the film.
The study was significant because it departed from behaviorism’s insistence that all
behavior is directed by reinforcement or rewards.

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The children received no encouragement or incentives to beat up the doll; they were
simply imitating the behavior they had observed.
Bandura termed these phenomena observational learning and characterized the
elements of effective observational learning as attention, retention, reciprocation and
motivation.
Behavior is learned through experiences with the environment
Children learn from experiences of others mainly through observation and
imitations and this behavior can be learned, unlearned and relearned.

Human motivation

Positive motivations
Past reinforcement, oral traditional behaviorism.
Promised reinforcements incentives
Vicarious reinforcement - seeing and recalling the model being reinforced
Negative Motivations
Past punishment.
Promised punishment -threats.
Vicarious punishment.
Personality development & Good Psychological Health
According to the behavioral model of a well-adjusted person is someone who has;
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrzzbaomLmc) Self efficacy-
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Self-Efficacy Characteristics
One who has learned to see himself as a master of his cognitive process and
psychological functioning.
Acquired the necessary skills to influence events in his other world.
When faced with a problem can formulate a course of action to solve the problem or
when he is not able to overcome it, he engages in internal dialogue to prevent him
from becoming anxious.
Once a goal has been met, the individual can reinforce the self.
Works towards developing his potentialities and does not result in medication
Psychopathology
A person is said to be psychologically unhealthy when he is unable to;
 solve his/her problem
Due to failure experiences, we seem not to be able to reverse the trend and the
individual is left confused, bewildered, and anxious.
 When an individual is unable to bring traumatic experiences under
control.
This brings about a panic attack.
As a result of the traumatic experience, the person feels significantly less confident
when faced with similar situations.

 Self-regulation vs. uncontrolled behavior

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Being unable to stop maladaptive behavior like phobias, smoking, drinking because of
the immediate gratification and not thinking about the consequences.
 Assertion vs. learned helplessness
This is when an individual is unable to influence the outcome of a particular situation
learning helpless.
 Social competence vs. social inadequacy.
When a person is not actively involved in asocial network for instance marriage, peer
associates.
They are said to have made a poor adjustment to life

Acquisition of psychological disturbances

Traumatic learning experience-

A traumatic experience produces behavior change by modifying the individual’s

knowledge of himself and his environment.
This leads to maladaptive behavior.
Modeling of maladaptive behavior
According to social learning theory, people often acquire neurotic depressive patterns
of behavior through observation of how significant others interact with the
environment.

Perpetuation of psychological disturbance

Avoidance and escape
 By running away from difficult situations, the individual is promising himself
with information concerning her ability to master her environment by lowering
her perceived self-efficacy and avoids confronting the problem.

 Negative self-talk

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Most people engage in self-defeating thinking patterns which act as cues for
maladaptive behavior.
 Reinforcement of maladaptive behavior.
A psychological disturbance is particularly likely to persist if it is occurrence is
compounded by sympathy or attention from others in the client’s life
 Significant others as mastery models
If the significant others are achieving, one will then lower her perceived self-efficacy
still further and depression will be a likely consequence.
The end result is that the maladaptive behavior persists on.

Therapeutic process
Generally, aims to eliminate maladaptive behavior and learn more effective behavior.
Help the client achieve a greater understanding of her problem and factors that has
contributed to her current difficulties. This facilitates change.
Collaborative working of the therapist and client to enable clients to develop problem
solving skills to allow later solving of the same problems without seeking therapy.
Therapist work towards increasing self-efficacy of the client.
The goals set should be-SMART-specific, measurable, attainable/articulate, realistic
and time bound.

Techniques
 Self-regulation
Bandura (1986) has recommended teaching students how to self-regulate personal,
behavioral and environmental aspects of their lives through three essential self-
management processes: self-observation, judgmental process, and self-reaction.
Modelling
Coping models, who gradually overcame difficulties through perseverant effort had
greater impact than mastery models who performed flawlessly from the outset
Coping modeling instilled higher levels of self-efficacy through perceived similarity.
In addition, studies of peer modeling have been conducted to show how students learn
from knowledgeable classmates
How, when, and where to structure those peer interactions form an important part of
social learning research on instructional modeling.

Assertion training
 Self-efficacy beliefs involve people's self- judgments of performance
capabilities in particular domains of functioning rather than omnibus trait or a
global self-concept.
 Empowering people to express self in the internally desired manner once
identified.

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  Helping People who lack social skills.
 People who have a problem in expressing themselves

Relaxation
According to Bandura, guided mastery through participant modeling raises perceived
efficacy in phobics, which in turn predicts reductions in stress-related hormones
Bandura (1997) reported that, "Perceived coping inefficacy is accompanied by
elevated biological stress reactions, but the same threats are managed without stress
when beliefs of coping efficacy are strengthened" (p. 266).
Such findings give testimony to biological as well as psychological plasticity.
Systematic desensitization
Bandura (1986) recommended guided mastery approach.
For each instructional step: A variety of opportunities are provided for guided practice
in when and how to use cognitive strategies in the solution of diverse problems.
The level of social guidance is progressively reduced as competencies are being
acquired.
Activities, incentives, and personal challenges are structured in ways that ensure self-
involving motivation and continual improvement.
Mostly used on people with phobias.
Flooding
This is sudden exposure to the threatening maladaptation to overcome it
Strengths
 Easily handles inconsistencies in behaviour
 Optimistic, in a good way
 Accurate picture explaining how behaviour is learned
 Offers a way to integrate social and cognitive theories
 Allows and accounts for cognitive processes
 Explains a large number of behaviors
 Accurate and easy to understand

Weaknesses
 Too heavy of an emphasis on what happens instead of what the observer does
with what happens
 Does not take into account physical and mental changes
 Doesn’t explain all behavior
 Doesn’t explain behavioral differences
 Doesn’t take in account that what one person views as punishment, another
person may view as a reward

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Biasness
The only bias is that for majority of Bandura’s experiments, all of his subjects were
from the same focused area.
An example would be that for Bandura’s Bobo Doll experiment, all of his young
participants were from the Stanford University nursery

CONCLUSION
We cannot easily separate the effects on behavior of person and situation.
Individual’s own behavior is a contributor to the situation, which in turn affects his or
her behavior.
This theory, Bandura argues that we can best conceive personality as a set of internal
evaluating and interpretation processes (social learning person variables) that mediate
our interaction with the outside world, and indeed with our own inner thoughts and
feelings.
Such variables include competency and self-efficacy, self-regulatory systems and
plans, subjective values, encoding strategies and personal constructs, and
expectancies.
It is important to understand that they are interdependent processes: Changes in any
one may have effects on the others.