SLT: culture and media

• Seeing someone else being rewarded for gender appropriate behaviour is vicarious reinforcement
• A strength of SLT is that it can explain cultural differences in gender role behaviour
• The South Pacific tribes studies by Mead were:

  • Arapesh
  • Mundugamor
  • Tchambuli
• Social Learning Theory emphasises the importance of social and cognitive processes in our behaviour

  • gender roles are learnt by observing others - social
  • and mediational processes - cognitive
• Mediational processes

  1. Observing (same-sex) role models and paying attention
  2. retaining information about their actions and consequences (vicarious punishment from seeing a boy being laughed at when playing hopscotch)
  3. Become motivated to imitate gender appropriate behaviours (vicariously reinforced, not punished)
  4. also affected by their level of identification with the role model e.g. their age or gender, and their ability to reproduce it
  5. Motor reproduction - if they believe they are capable of imitating the gender appropriate behaviour then they are more likely to imitate it

  Modelling is where the child imitates the gender-related behaviour of a chosen role model