6 - Bandura and Mischel Flashcards
What was Watson’s radical behaviourism?
- reaction to messy and inconsistent introspection
- focus on objective, and repeatable data
- all references to internal processes should be banished
- relationships between environmental variables and observable behaviour
- he believed that all behaviour derived from the environment through learning
What was Thorndike’s contributions?
- law of effect
- instrumental learning, behaviour theory
- conscious act of organisms, not reflex
What was the general learning theory?
- basic rules of learning for mathematics
- Clark Hull, Kenneth Spence
What was Skinner’s semi-revolution?
- return to radical behaviourism
- functional relationships between stimuli and responses (not looking at internal mediators)
- importance of the environment
- main ideas = operant conditioning, positive and negative reinforcement, schedules of reinforcement
What are the two streams of influence for cognitivism?
- development of the first digital computer by Turing (metaphor for mind)
- Donald Broadbent (multistore model of memory)
What was Broadbent’s work about?
- selective attention
- hypothesized internal processes, which contravened the behaviourist notion of only input and output relations
What was Mischel’s critique of traits?
- “Personality and Assessment” = critique of the trait perspective
- expect to see a high correlation if traits are the main factor
- however, there is only a 0.3 correlation between trait and behaviour
- additionally, the correlation between behaviour in one situation and behaviour in another situation is 0.3
- this paper ended up re-energizing the trait perspective
What is reciprocal determinism?
- how we understand the relationship between the person, situation, and behaviour
- it is neither the person nor the situation that is more important for predicting behaviour
- it depends on the particular situation
What are the steps in the cycle of reciprocal determinism?
- we evaluate the situation = what should I be doing, what is an appropriate set of behaviours
- we behave
- the behaviour changes the situation
- then, we re-evaluate the situation
- we change the environment in which we live
How does the cognitive social learning theory talk about motivation?
- no talk about motivation
- goals = why are these goals important
- largely based on learning and experience
What are social learning person variables?
- internal evaluating and interpretation processes, interdependent processes
- not fixed, unchangeable things
- determine which stimuli are perceived, and acted upon
- active cognitive processes, operating in the present
- generated by social learning experiences
What are the 5 social learning person variables?
- competency and self-efficacy
- encoding strategies and personal constructs
- expectancies
- subjective values
- self-regulatory systems and plans
What is competency and self-efficacy?
- beliefs about what skills we have (in general)
- what can we do, what we’re capable of
- the beliefs we have dictate decisions and behaviours we choose to engage in
- those with a higher self-efficacy tend to risk more, try more things (growth choices), work harder, spend more time/effort, and have more positive emotions when facing a challenge
- self-fulfilling prophecies
- self-efficacy is based on =
what we have experienced (done and succeeded at), what others tell us we can do - our perceived skills is constantly adjusting based on feedback from our environment
What are encoding strategies?
- how we select and interpret information
- we tend to produce the outcome we expect
- eg. if we see the world as dangerous, we will have the experience, and find things to support the claim
What are personal constructs?
- encoding strategies about the self
- what kind of person am I
What are expectancies?
- things you believe to be true
- expectations about the consequences of behaviour
- eg. placebo, nocebo effect
What are the three types of expectancies?
- stimulus-outcome expectancies = what follows next (based on classical conditioning)
- behaviour-outcome expectancies = what will happen if I act in a certain way in this situation
- self-efficacy expectancies = what am I capable of doing in this specific situation
What are subjective values?
- what you value as an outcome
- more influenced by internal than by external reinforcements
What are self-regulatory systems?
- internal thermostat
- way of judging how well we’re doing
- different levels of self-accepted levels of performance = self-imposed achievement standards
- if there is a discrepancy between standards and performance = change behaviour to bring performance up, change expectations to achieve the standard
What are plans?
goals and plans that are important for the future
What determines the importance of delaying gratification?
- value of the future goal
- previous experience delaying gratification
- perceived self-efficacy concerning goal
- belief that future goal will be reached
- vicarious social learning from models
What are chance occurrences?
- unexpected events that shape the future
- things you can’t plan for
- if you have high perceived self-efficacy, you are less likely to be drawn into negative situations
What are the positives of the social cognitive theory?
- sees importance of language and cognition
- optimistic view of people
- emphasizes present or future over past
- generates research on relevant issues
What are the negatives of social cognitive theory?
- vague and ill-defined terms
- few ideas about development over time
- ignores unconscious
- cognitions do not cause behaviour (say behaviourists)
- no better at predicting behaviour
