Cognitive Social Learning Theory: Walter 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

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

Answer 2

Personality and Assessment

Question 3

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 3

traits

Question 4

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 4

situation

Question 5

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 5

consistency paradox

Question 6

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 6

Person-Situation Interaction

Question 7

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

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

Answer 7

cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS)

Question 8

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 8

delay-of-gratification

Question 9

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 9

Encoding Strategies

Question 10

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 10

Bandura

Question 11

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 11

social-cognitive