Chapter 16: Cognitive Social Learning Theory (Mischel)

Question 1

Mischel and his colleagues have advocated a reconciliation between the processing dynamics approach and the personal dispositions approach.

This _____ holds that behavior stems from relatively stable personal dispositions and cognitive-affective processes interacting with a particular situation.

Answer 1

cognitive-affective personality theory

Question 2

_____ taught Mischel the importance of research design for improving assessment techniques and for measuring the effectiveness of therapeutic treatment;

Answer 2

Rotter

Question 3

_____ taught him that participants in psychology experiments are like the psychologists who study them in that they are thinking, feeling human beings.

Answer 3

Kelly

Question 4

Mischel’s most important early work was _____, an outgrowth of his efforts to identify successful Peace Corps volunteers.

Answer 4

Personality and Assessment

Question 5

In Personality and Assessment, Mischel argued that _____ are weak predictors of performance in a variety of situations and that the situation is more important than ______ in influencing behavior.

Answer 5

traits

Question 6

Some theorists, such as Hans Eysenck and Gordon Allport, believed that behavior was mostly a product of relatively stable personality traits. However, Walter Mischel objected to this assumption. His early research led him to believe that behavior was largely a function of the _____.

Answer 6

situation

Question 7

Mischel saw that both laypersons and professional psychologists seem to intuitively believe that people’s behavior is relatively consistent, yet empirical evidence suggests much variability in behavior, a situation Mischel called the _____.

Answer 7

consistency paradox

Question 8

_____ would say that even though people do not always display a strong personal trait, for example, conscientiousness, the sum total of their individual behaviors will reflect a generally conscientious core

Answer 8

Epstein

Question 9

He acknowledged that most people have some consistency in their behavior, but he continued to insist that the situation has a powerful effect on behavior.

Answer 9

Person-Situation Interaction

Question 10

To solve the classical consistency parados, Mischel and Shoda proposed a _____.

The _____ predicts that a person’s behavior will change from situation to situation but in a meaningful manner

Answer 10

cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS)

Question 11

Mischel and Shoda believe that _____ in behavior can be conceptualized in this framework: If A, then X; but if B, then Y.

For example, if Mark is provoked by his wife, then he will react with aggression. However, when the “if ” changes, so does the “then.” If Mark is provoked by his boss, then he will react with submission. Mark’s behavior may seem inconsistent because he apparently reacts differently to the same stimulus.

Answer 11

variations

Question 12

“If personality is a stable system that processes the information about the situations, external or internal, then it follows that as individuals encounter different situations, their behaviors should vary across the situations”

Answer 12

Behavior Prediction

Question 13

It assumes that personality may have temporal stability and that behaviors may vary from situation to situation.

Answer 13

Behavior Prediction

Question 14

When different people are behaving in a very similar manner—for example, while watching an emotional scene in an engrossing movie—_____ are more powerful than personal characteristics.

Answer 14

Situation Variables

Question 15

In this _____ study, nursery school children were told that they would receive a small reward after a short period of time, but a larger treat if they could wait longer.

Children who thought about the treat had difficulty waiting, whereas children who were able to wait the longest used a variety of self-distractions to avoid thinking about the reward.

Answer 15

delay-of-gratification

Question 16

_____ include all those psychological, social, and physiological aspects of people that cause them to interact with their environment with a relatively stable pattern of variation.

These units include people’s (1) encoding strategies, (2) competencies and self-regulatory strategies, (3) expectancies and beliefs, (4) goals and values, and (5) affective responses.

Answer 16

Cognitive-Affective Units

Question 17

One important cognitive-affective unit that ultimately affects behavior is people’s personal constructs and encoding strategies: that is, people’s ways of categorizing information received from external stimuli.

Answer 17

Encoding Strategies

Question 18

Our beliefs in what we can do relate to our _____. Mischel used the term “competencies” to refer to that vast array of information we acquire about the world and our relationship to it. By observing our own behaviors and those of others, we learn what we can do in a particular situation as well as what we cannot do.

Answer 18

competencies

Question 19

Mischel agreed with _____ that we do not attend to all stimuli in our environment; rather, we selectively construct or generate our own version of the real world.

Answer 19

Bandura

Question 20

Mischel believes that people use _____ (like Bandura) to control their own behavior through self-imposed goals and self-produced consequences. People’s self-regulatory system enables them to plan, initiate, and maintain behaviors even when environmental support is weak or nonexistent.

Answer 20

self-regulatory strategies

Question 21

Any situation presents an enormous number of behavioral potentials, but how people behave depends on their specific expectancies and beliefs about the consequences of each of the different behavioral possibilities.

Answer 21

Expectancies and Beliefs

Question 22

The two may have had many similar experiences during college, but because they have different goals, they have made very different decisions.

Answer 22

Goals and Values

Question 23

_____ include emotions, feelings, and physiological reactions. Mischel sees affective responses as inseparable from cognitions and regards the interlocking cognitive-affective units as more basic than the other cognitive-affective units.

Answer 23

Affective responses

Question 24

The researchers included several personality variables in their effort to predict who was a hero and who was a bystander; one such variable was _____.

Answer 24

locus of control

Question 25

Being oriented more toward an internal sense of control was predicted to relate to being a _____ hero because such individuals believe they have control over life events and success is not due to luck or chance (as people with an external sense of control would believe).

Answer 25

Holocaust

Question 26

If the target of the interaction was of a high status (professor), then the student was very warm; but if the target was not of high status, then the student was not warm.

Similarly, when the student was described as unfriendly, participants predicted she would be rather warm toward people she knew well but not at all warm toward unfamiliar people.

Answer 26

Person-Situation Interaction

Question 27

Mischel and colleagues concluded that the _____ interactionist conceptualization of the person-situation environment is a more appropriate way of understanding human behavior than the traditional “decontextualized” views of personality in which people behave in a given way regardless of the context.

Answer 27

social-cognitive