SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY: BANDURA AND MISCHEL

1
Chapter 12

• SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY BANDURA AND MISCHEL

2
QUESTIONS TO BE ADDRESSED IN THIS CHAPTER

• What is the role of cognitive processes in
  personality?
• How do people learn complex social behaviors?
• How can one scientifically analyze peoples
  capacity for agency, that is, their ability to
  influence their own actions and course of
  development?
• In what ways do variations in behavior as
  opposed to consistencies reveal the nature of
  personality?

3
(No Transcript)
4
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• STRUCTURE
• 4 structural concepts
• Competencies and skills
• Expectancies and beliefs
• Evaluative standards
• Personal goals

5
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• COMPETENCIES AND SKILLS
• Individual differences may reflect variation in
  the competencies needed to perform different
  types of actions (e.g., introverts may lack
  social skills)
• Competencies involve ways of thinking about
  challenging situations and the skills needed to
  execute solutions

6
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• COMPETENCIES AND SKILLS
• Competencies involve 2 types of knowledge
  procedural and declarative
• Declarative knowledge cognitive and behavioral
  capacities that can be expressed in words
• Procedural knowledge cognitive and behavioral
  capacities that a person may not be able to state
  in words

7
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• COMPETENCIES AND SKILLS
• The focus on competencies has 2 implications
• Context specificity
• A person may have excellent study skills, but
  they are of little use in getting a date
• Psychological change
• A person who lacks competence in a certain domain
  can acquire adaptive skills through social
  interaction (e.g., modeling)

8
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• BELIEFS, STANDARDS, AND GOALS
• People think about the world in 3 ways
• People have beliefs about what the world really
  is like and what the world will be like (when
  beliefs involve the future, they are termed
  expectancies)
• People have thoughts about what the world should
  be like - evaluative standards (i.e., mental
  criteria for judging goodness and worth)
• People have thoughts about what they want to
  achieve in the future - goals

9
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES
• A primary determinant of action and emotion is
  expectations about the future
• People have expectancies about many things
• The behavior of others
• Rewards or punishments that may follow certain
  actions
• Their ability to cope with situational challenges
  and stress
• The capacity to have different expectations, and
  therefore different responses across situations,
  is adaptive

10
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES
• The essence of personality lies in the diverse
  ways that people
• Perceive specific situations
• Develop expectancies about future events
• As a result of having differing perceptions and
  expectancies, people exhibit distinctive behavior
  patterns
• In this way, social-cognitive theorists can
  explain why two people react differently to the
  same environment

11
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES
• Self-Efficacy
• Perceived self-efficacy expectations of ones
  capability to initiate and sustain specific
  action in a future situation
• People with a high self-efficacy are likely to
• Attempt difficult tasks
• Persist in their efforts
• Remain calm (vs. anxious) during task performance
• Organize task-related thoughts logically

12
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES
• Self-Efficacy
• People with low self-efficacy
• Do not attempt desired activities
• Give up when they encounter difficulty
• Become anxious during task performance
• Become rattled by failing to think analytically
  about the task

13
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES
• Self-Efficacy
• Perceived self-efficacy differs from self-esteem
  in 2 ways
• Perceived self-efficacy is not a global
  construct people have different self-efficacy
  beliefs in different situations
• Perceived self-efficacy is not an abstract sense
  of personal worth, but a judgment of what one can
  do
• The correlation between self-esteem and
  performance is weak, whereas the correlation
  between perceived self-efficacy and performance
  is strong

14
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES
• Self-Efficacy
• The difference between perceived self-efficacy
  and outcome expectations
• Perceived self-efficacy expectations about
  ones capability to initiate and sustain specific
  action in a future situation
• Outcome expectations beliefs about the
  consequences (i.e., rewards and punishments) that
  follow specific action in a future situation
• In general, perceived self-efficacy is more
  important than outcome expectations in
  determining situational behavior

15
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES
• Self-Efficacy
• Microanalytic research strategy
• Situation-specific measures capture variability
  in perceived self-efficacy
• People rate their degree of certainty in
  performing specific behaviors in specific
  situations
• Do you think you are a good basketball player?
  versus How confident are you that you can make
  at least 75 of your free throws?

16
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• GOALS
• Goal a mental representation of the aim of an
  action or sequence of actions
• The ability to envision the future enables people
  to set goals and, thus, motivate and direct their
  own behavior
• Goals
• Establish priorities from among alternative
  futures
• Contribute to self-regulation
• Organize behavior over time
• May differ in subjective meaning (e.g., learning
  vs. performance goals)

17
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• GOALS
• Goal systems
• Hierarchically organized
• Flexible
• Peoples goals for a task may differ in many ways
• Level of challenge (e.g., passing a course vs.
  getting an A)
• Proximity (e.g., losing 1 pound each week vs. 12
  pounds in the next three months)
• Proximal goals have more influence on current
  behavior than do distal goals, which allow one to
  slack off in the present

18
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• EVALUATIVE STANDARDS
• Criteria for judging the quality of behavior and
  that influence emotions and future action
  fundamental to motivation and level of
  performance
• Personal standards internalized evaluative
  standards commonly used to evaluate the quality
  ones own behavior
• Evaluative standards often trigger emotional
  reactions or self-evaluative reactions (e.g.,
  pride vs. dissatisfaction)

19
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• EVALUATIVE STANDARDS
• Moral behavior
• Although members of society are familiar with its
  moral principles, people do not always use them
  to guide their own actions
• Sometimes people disengage from their moral
  evaluative standards when they perceive an
  advantage in doing so
• Disengaging from moral evaluative standards
  allows people to act in ways they normally would
  not

20
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• EVALUATIVE STANDARDS
• Osofsky et al. (2005) - how can people who
  generally believe that killing is wrong execute
  prisoners?
• Studied staff at maximum-security prisons who
  differed in their level of involvement in
  executions
• Staff completed a measure of the tendency to
  disengage from moral evaluative standards
• The degree to which staff displayed moral
  disengagement varied according to their level of
  involvement in executions
• Staff who were directly involved in executions
  showed higher levels of moral disengagement

21
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Reciprocal Determinism
• Behavior, personality, and the environment
  constitute a system of forces that mutually
  influence one another over time
• Discourse about inner versus outer or internal
  versus external forces fails to recognize how
  the person and environment influence each another
  (P x E)

22
(No Transcript)
23
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS)
• The functioning of any system reflects not only
  its parts, but also how its parts are
  interconnected
• Systems with many integrated parts exhibit
  complex and coherent functioning, even if the
  parts themselves are relatively simple
• Personality is such a system
• Social-cognitive constructs are relatively simple
• Social cognitive constructs interact in a
  complex, yet organized fashion and bring
  coherence to personality functioning

24
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS)
• Mischel Shoda (1995)
• Different elements of situations activate
  different subsets of the personality system
• If this proposition is true, then peoples
  thoughts, feelings, and behavior should vary from
  situation to situation

25
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS)
• Shoda et al.(1994)
• Children at summer camp were observed in various
  settings (e.g., cabin meeting, playground)
• Each situation was defined in terms of whether
  childrens interactions
• Involved a peer or an adult counselor
• Was positive or negative
• For each child, the frequency of five types of
  behavior were recorded - verbal aggression,
  physical aggression, whiny behavior, compliance,
  and prosocial talk
• Recordings were made each hour, 5 hours per day,
  6 days per week, for 6 weeks

26
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS)
• Shoda et al.(1994)
• Behavior differed in different situations
• Individual differences were found in the
  expression of each of the five behaviors
• Each child had a distinctive, stable profile of
  behavior expressed in specific situations
• Averaging behavior across situations would have
  masked distinctive patterns of situation-behavior
  relationships

27
(No Transcript)
28
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS)
• Behavioral signatures distinctive profiles of
  situation-behavior relationships
• It is this type of intraindividual stability in
  the pattern and organization of behavior that
  seems especially central for a psychology of
  personality ultimately devoted to understanding
  and capturing the uniqueness of individual
  functioning (Shoda et al., 1994, p. 683).

29
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Observational Learning (Modeling)
• Sometimes learning cannot occur by inefficient
  trial-and-error because errors are costly
• People can learn by observing the behavior of
  others and the consequences to them
• Observational learning (modeling) people form
  mental representations of situational behavior
  and consequences that they have seen which they
  use in the future to guide their own adaptive
  responses
• More complex than imitation

30
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Observational Learning (Modeling)
• Acquisition versus Performance
• Bandura et al. (1963)
• Three groups of children observed a model
  displaying aggression toward a Bobo doll
• Reward, Punishment, No Consequences
• After observing the models aggressive behavior,
  children were presented with two conditions
• Positive Incentive, No Incentive

31
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Observational Learning (Modeling)
• Bandura et al. (1963)
• Did consequences to the model affect childrens
  aggressive behavior?
• Children who observed the Model Punished
  performed fewer imitative acts than children in
  the Model Rewarded or No Consequences groups
• This difference disappeared when children were
  offered incentives to reproduce the models
  behavior (Positive Incentive)
• Consequences to the model affected childrens
  performance of aggressive acts, but not their
  acquisition or learning of how to behave
  aggressively

32
(No Transcript)
33
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Observational Learning (Modeling)
• Vicarious conditioning the process of learning
  emotional reactions by observing others
• Intense, persistent fear of snakes developed in
  young monkeys that observed their parents
  behaving fearfully in the presence of real or toy
  snakes
• Participants who observed a model exhibiting fear
  toward an object developed a conditioned
  emotional response to that previously neutral
  stimulus

34
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Delay of Gratification
• Bandura Mischel (1965)
• Children high or low in delay of gratification
  were exposed to models of the opposite behavior
• High-delay children observed a model who selected
  a small immediate reward and commented on its
  benefits low-delay children observed a model who
  selected a larger deferred reward and commented
  on the virtues of delay
• Live-model condition - children observed a model
  who chose between a small immediate reward versus
  a larger reward later
• Symbolic-model condition - children read verbal
  accounts of high versus low delay choices
• No-model condition children were told about the
  high versus low delay choices given to adults

35
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Delay of Gratification
• Bandura Mishcel (1965)
• Following exposure, children were given a choice
  between an immediate small reward or a large
  delayed reward
• High-delay children across conditions altered
  their choices in favor of immediate gratification
• The live-model condition produced the greatest
  effect
• Low-delay children across conditions altered
  their choices in favor of deferred gratification
• No differences were found between types of
  modeling
• For all children, the effects of modeling were
  maintained for at least one month

36
(No Transcript)
37
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Delay of Gratification
• Availability for attention has an effect on
  childrens capacity to delay
• When rewards are concealed, most children can
  wait
• When rewards are visible, most children have
  difficulty controlling their impulses
• In addition to physical availability, a key
  element in delay of gratification is what
  children think of as they try to wait for the
  larger reward

38
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Delay of Gratification
• Children tend to delay when they use strategies
  that mentally distance them from the attractive
  features of a reward
• Think about how marshmallows resemble non-food
  objects (e.g., clouds)
• Sing songs to themselves or play distracting
  mental games
• Cool encoding thinking about a stimulus in ways
  that do not activate hot impulsive emotions

39
SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY

• PROCESS
• Delay of Gratification
• Implications for personality development
• Shoda et al. (1990)
• Correlation between preschool measures of delay
  in a laboratory setting and measures of cognitive
  and social competencies attained in adolescence

40
(No Transcript)