Bandura

• Plasticity, Triadic Reciprocal Causation Model; Agentic Perspective; Basic; People regulate their conduct through internal and external factors; When people find themselves in morally ambiguous situations, they typically attempt to regulate their behavior through moral agency

  Assumptions of the Social Cognitive Theory
• Plasticity


  Humans have the flexibility to learn a variety of behaviors in diverse situations
• Triadic Reciprocal Causation Model

  Includes behavioral, environmental, and personal factors in which people have the capacity to regulate their lives
• Chance Encounters, Fortuitous Events

  Two Important Environmental Forces
• Agentic Perspective


  Humans have the capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of their lives and they are products of social systems
• Self-Efficacy; Proxy Agency; and Collective Efficacy

  Agentic Perspective Includes
• Self-efficacy


  People's performance is generally enhanced when they have high self-efficacy; Confidence that they can perform those behaviors that will produce desired behaviors in a particular situation
• Proxy Agency


  People are able to rely on others for goods and services
• Collective Efficacy


  People's shared beliefs that they can bring about change
• External factors


  Physical and social environments
• Internal factors


  Self-observation, judgmental process, and self-reaction
• When people find themselves in morally ambiguous situations, they typically attempt to regulate their behavior through moral agency


  Includes redefining the behavior, disregarding or distorting the consequences of their behavior, dehumanizing or blaming the victims of their behavior, and displacing or diffusing responsibility for their actions
• Learning


  One of the basic assumptions is that humans are quite flexible and capable of learning a multitude of attitudes, skills, and behaviors and a good bit of those learnings are a result of vicarious experiences
• Observation; Modeling


  Elements of Observational Learning
• Observation


  Allows people to learn without performing any behavior; Believed that it is much more efficient than learning through direct experience
• Modeling


  Core of observational learning that involves adding and subtracting from the observed behavior and generalizing from one observation to another
• Cognitive Processes


  Modeling involves ______, not simply mimicry or imitation
• Characteristics of the Model; Characteristics of the Observer

  Factors that Determine Whether a Person will Learn from a Model
• High Status > Low Status; Competent > Incompetent; Powerful > Impotent


  Characteristics of the Model
• People who lack status, skill, or power are most likely to model ; Children model more than older people; Novices model more than experts


  Characteristics of the Observer
• Attention, Representation, Behavioral Production, Motivation

  Factors Governing Observational Learning
• Individuals we Frequently Associate with; Attractive Models; Nature of Models


  Factors that Regulate Attention
• Representation


  For observation to lead to new response patterns, they must be symbolically represented in memory; Can be verbal or visual and can be summoned in the absence of a physical model; Verbal coding greatly speeds the process of observational language
• Behavioral Production


  Ability to Produce Behavior
• Motivation


  Observational learning is most effective when learners are motivated to perform the modeled behavior
• Enactive Learning


  Every response a person makes is followed by some consequence
• Informs us of the effects of our actions; Motivate anticipatory behavior; Serve to reinforce behavior


  3 Functions of Consequences
• Observational; Enactive


  Two Major Kinds of Learning
• Observational


  Core: Modeling; Facilitated by attention, representation, behavioral production, and motivation
• Enactive


  Allows people to acquire new patterns of complex behavior through direct experience by thinking about and evaluating the consequences of their behaviors; Allows people to have some degree of control over events but control rests with a three-way reciprocal interaction of person variables, behavior, and environment
• Triadic Reciprocal Causation


  Bandura explains psychological functioning in terms of this that assumes human action is a result of an interaction of environment, behavior, and person
• Person


  Largely, but not exclusively, such cognitive factors as memory, anticipation, planning, and judging
• Environment


  Because people have cognitive capacities, they have some capacity to select or to restructure their environment
• Chance Encounter


  Unintended meeting of persons unfamiliar to each other that influences the triadic reciprocal causation paradigm at environment
• Fortuitous Event


  Environmental experience that is unexpected and unintended
• Human Agency


  Essence of humanness wherein people have the power to influence their own actions to produce desired consequences
• Intentionality, Forethought, Self-Reactiveness, Self-Reflectiveness

  Four Core Features of Human Agency
• Intentionality


  Acts a person performs intentionality that includes planning and action
• Forethought


  Used to set goals, anticipate likely outcomes of their actions, and to select behaviors that will produce desired outcomes and avoid undesirable ones; Enables people to break free from the constraints of their environment
• Self-Reactiveness


  People not only make choices but they monitor their progress toward fulfilling those choices