CHAPTER 11: ALBERT BANDURA AND WALTER MISCHEL Flashcards
Social-Cognitive Theory.
Name given to Bandura and Mitchell’s theory because of its emphasis on the social and cognitive origins of human behaviour.
What is the explanation of the name “Social-Cognitive Theory” according to Bandura?
“The social portion of the terminology acknowledges the social origins of much human thought and action; the cognitive portion recognizes the influential causal contribution of thought process to human motivation, affect, and action.”
True or False: Social cognitive theory views the interaction between the person and the environment as high complex and individualistic.
True: Each individual brings to each situation the remnants of previous experience, which are used to deal with the present situation.
What is at heart of the Social-Cogntitive Theory?
The notion of observational learning.
The most important fact about observational learning is that it requires no reinforcement.
When was Albert Bandura born?
In mundane, a small town in the province of Alberta, Canada.
Who was Bandura’s parents?
Farmers of Polish heritage.
True or False: Bandura spent the summer working on the Alaskan highway.
True: Many of the men with whom he worked with had fled to Alaska to escape “creditors, alimony, and probation officers.”
How did working with others made Bandura feel?
“A keen appreciation for the psychopathology of everyday life.”
True or False: Bandura entered the University of British Columbia in 1946 and obtained his BA in 1949, with a major in psychology.
True: Afterwards, he went to the University of Iowa where he obtained his MA and his PhD.
Where did Bandura meet his future wife, Virgina Varns.
At the University of Iowa
Who were Bandura’s daughters?
Mary and Carol.
Who was Bandura’s first patient on the familial causes of aggression?
His first graduate student, Richard Walters.
Where was Walter Mischel born?
In Vienna, Austria, within walking distance of Freud’s house.
Why did Mischel move to the United States?
The Nazis invaded Austria.
Where did Mischel’s family settle?
In Brooklyn, New York.
Mischel attended primary and secondary school and earned a college scholarship.
True or False: Mischel was forced to work.
True: His father became ill, therefore, he worked as a stock boy, elevator operator, and assistant in a garment factory before he was finally able to attend New York University, where he pursued his interests in paining, sculpture and psychology.
How did Mischel strengthen his humanistic inclinations?
By reading existential philosophy and poetry.
How did George Kelly and Julian Rotter influence Mischel?
Rotter’s work emphasized the importance of experiences in human behaviour and Kelly stressed the importance of the formulation of mental concepts in dealing with the world.
Both Rotter and Kelly emphasized cognitive events in dealing with the current situations and deemphasized the importance of traits and early developmental experience.
How did Mischel observe that shme people have the ability to reject small, immediate rewards in favour of larger, but delayed rewards.
When living in a Trinidad village in the caribbean studying religious cults that practiced spirit possession.
He also observed that people with this ability to delay gratification had higher needs for achievement and showed more social responsibility.
True or False: Mischel neat taught for two years at the University of Colorado before joining the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University.
True: While at Harvard, his interests in personality theory and assessment were furthered by discussions with Gordon Allport.
What happened at Harvard?
Mischel met his future wife, Harriet Nerve, who was a graduate student in cognitive psychology.
The Mischels eventually had three daughters.
True or False: Mischel joined the faculty at Columbia University.
True: Mischel pursued his long-standing interests in delayed gratification, self-control, and the cognitive processes utilized by individuals in their interactions with the world.
Consistency of Human Behaviour.
Most personality theorists assumed that a person’s behaviour is fairly consistent over time and across similar situations.
It was assumed that how people act at one time in their lives will be more or less how they act at other times, and that they will tend to respond to similar situations in similar ways.
Provide an example of Consistency of Human Behaviour.
If a person is outgoing in one social situation, he or she will be outgoing in another situation and will continue to respond in that characteristic way throughout most of his or her life.
It was also assumed that scores o various personality tests and questionnaires would correlate significant with actual behaviour.
If a person scores high on a scale intended to measure introversion, he or she would tend to be introverted in social situations.
Psychoanalytic theory.
Attempted to account for consistency by postulating repressed experiences, complexes, fixations, or internalized values.
True or False: The conclusion of consistency can sometimes only be reached by a trained psychoanalyst.
True: It is assumed that sometimes extreme aggression really means passivity, love sometimes really means hate, and repulsion sometimes really means attraction.
How is Trait Theory and influence of consistency?
Explains why (for instance) a neat person tended to be neat in a wide variety of situation.
Learning theory emphasized the role of reinforcement.
Behaviour that was reinforced tended to persist and to transfer the situations similar to the one in which the reinforcement had occurred.
