Bandura

• What is the personality theory of Bandura?

  Social Cognitive Theory
• Chance encounters and fortuitous events have been largely ignored by most personality theorists, even though most of us recognize that we have had unplanned experiences that have greatly changed our lives.
• Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory takes chance encounters and fortuitous events seriously, even while recognizing that these meetings and events do not invariably alter one’s life path.
• The outstanding characteristic of humans is plasticity; that is, humans have the flexibility to learn a variety of behaviors in diverse situations.
• Bandura agrees with Skinner that people can and do learn through direct experience, but he places much more emphasis on vicarious learning, that is, learning by observing others.
• Bandura also stresses the idea that reinforcement can be vicarious; people can be reinforced by observing another person receive a reward. This indirect reinforcement accounts for a good bit of human learning.
• Triadic reciprocal causation model that includes behavioral, environmental, and personal factors, people have the capacity to regulate their lives.
• Two important environmental forces in the triadic model are chance encounters and fortuitous events.
• Social cognitive theory takes an agentic perspective, meaning that humans have the capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of their lives.
• An important component of the triadic reciprocal causation model is self-efficacy.
• In addition to self-efficacy, both proxy agency and collective efficacy can predict performance.
• With proxy agency, people are able to rely on others for goods and services, whereas collective efficacy refers to people’s shared beliefs that they can bring about change.
• External factors include people’s physical and social environments, whereas internal factors include self-observation, judgmental process, and self-reaction.
• He grew up the only boy in a family of five older sisters.

  Bandura
• Bandura believes that observation allows people to learn without performing any behavior.
• Bandura differs from Skinner, who held that enactive behavior is the basic datum of psychological science. He also departs from Skinner in his belief that reinforcement is not essential to learning.
• Bandura believes that observational learning is much more efficient than learning through direct experience.
• The core of observational learning is modeling.
• Learning through modeling involves adding and subtracting from the observed behavior and generalizing from one observation to another.
• Bandura (1986) recognizes four processes that govern observational learning: Attention, Representation, Behavioral Production, and Motivation
• Symbolic representation need not be verbal, because some observations are retained in imagery and can be summoned in the absence of the physical model. This process is especially important in infancy when verbal skills are not yet developed.
• Verbal coding greatly speeds the process of observational learning. With language we can verbally evaluate our behaviors and decide which ones we wish to discard and which ones we desire to try.
• Verbal coding also helps us to rehearse the behavior symbolically: that is, to tell ourselves over and over again how we will perform the behavior once given the chance.
• Rehearsal can also entail the actual performance of the modeled response, and this rehearsal aids the retention process.
• Attention and representation can lead to the acquisition of learning, but performance is facilitated by motivation to enact that particular behavior.
• Bandura believes that new behaviors are acquired through two major kinds of learning: observational learning and enactive learning.
• The core element of observational learning is modeling, which is facilitated by observing appropriate activities, properly coding these events for representation in memory, actually performing the behavior, and being sufficiently motivated.
• Enactive learning allows people to acquire new patterns of complex behavior through direct experience by thinking about and evaluating the consequences of their behaviors.
• Control rests with a three-way reciprocal interaction of person variables, behavior, and environment.
• This system assumes that human action is a result of an interaction among three variables—environment, behavior, and person.

  triadic reciprocal causation
• In Triadic reciprocal causation: B signifies behavior; E is the external environment; and P represents the person.
• Although behavior and environment can at times be the most powerful contributors to performance, cognition (person) is usually the strongest contributor to performance.
• Bandura is the only personality theorist to seriously consider the possible importance of these chance encounters and fortuitous events.
• Bandura defined a chance encounter as “an unintended meeting of persons unfamiliar to each other”.
• A fortuitous event is an environmental experience that is unexpected and unintended.
• Fortuity adds a separate dimension in any scheme used to predict human behavior, and it makes accurate predictions practically impossible.
• Prepared person is able to escape unpleasant chance encounters and chance misfortunes by anticipating their possibility and taking steps to minimize any negative impact they may have on future development.
• Human agency is the essence of humanness.
• Human agency does not mean that people possess a homunculus — that is, an autonomous agent—making decisions that are consistent with their view of self.
• Human agency is not a thing but an active process of ­exploring, manipulating, and influencing the environment in order to attain desired ­outcomes.