social learning theory

• Imitation is when a person observes a behaviour and tries to replicate it. Most important mechanism of learning. Once behaviour has been observed and stored it can be reproduced whenever the situation is appropriate.
• Identification is when people, especially children are more likely to imitate a behaviour of people who they identify with, called role models.
• Modelling when someone is influential on in some way, the individual demonstrating the behaviour is called the model. Imitation is likely to occur if the model is of the same sex, age as the observer, and are likeable, conventionally attractive and appear to have a high social status. If the individual then imitates the model in some way, it is known as modelling the behaviour.
• Vicarious reinforcement is when a person sees the model receiving the reinforcement, they don’t get the reward themselves but see the role model getting the reward, so they try to imitate the behaviour to get the reward too.
• Attention – need to pay attention first to be able to recreate it.

  Retention – form a memory of the behaviour so it can be replicated later.

  Reproduction – ability to recreate behaviour that has been demonstrated.

  o   Motivation – learner must want to demonstrate what they’ve learnt.
• For example, a child may learn to punch others when angry. Social learning of this behaviour would mean the child needs to pay attention to a mode demonstrating the angry behaviour, remembers the angry behaviour, reproduces the angry behaviour when a similar situation arises and is motivated to repeat by having seen the model rewarded in some way for their punch, for example getting a round of applause from friends.
• Strength of this study

  • Supporting evidence from Bandura's Bobo Doll experiment
  • Children more likely to imitate aggressive model if same sex
  • Children more likely to imitate behaviour after observing 'big bully' being rewarded
• A weakness is that the theory doesn’t account for the maintenance of the learnt behaviour. Social learning theory suggests that a behaviour is learnt and replicated due to observation and vicarious reinforcement which is wanting to imitate the role model to gain a reward they observed the role model get. This is a weakness as it doesn’t state whether the behaviour will be extinguished after getting the reward of continued if the person observes the role model perform the behaviour for a repeated number of times.
• Bandura's ideas were developed through observation of young children in a lab setting
• Children were exposed to aggressive models who hit the Bobo dolls
• The lab setting lacks ecological validity as we cannot generalise the way children normally learn as the situation has been manipulated