Lecture 17 - Neobehaviourism and Social-Cognitive Theory

Question 1

Radical versus neo-behaviourism

Answer 1

• Radical beh.(Watson, Thorndike, Skinner):
  no interest in mediating factors
  between S and R.
  Reinforcement a “conditio sine qua non”
• Neo-behaviourism (E. Tolman): S - O - R
  State of organism, emotional state,
  cognitive state (map);
  Reinforcement is not required in learning

EO - BEHAVIORISM
* The mechanisms involved between S and R:
- state of the organism,
- a mental representation of S and R in the form of:
* cognitive maps
* expectations
* plans of action
* Edward C. Tolman
- the cognitive map is learned without reinforcement
- latent learning

Question 2

Social-Cognitive Theory
“Social Learning Theory”
“Social Learning and Personality”
“Psychological Modeling”
“Self-Efficacy”
Albert Bandura

Answer 2

Albert Bandura
born 1925
A Canadian-American psychologist

Social-cognitive theory
* “Individual cognition” - exploring, mapping,
memorizing, processing, reasoning, evaluating
* “Social cognition” – learning from others: from
direct or symbolic models representing the
collective experience (embedded in the language
system, customs, rituals, rules, and traditions).

earning from personal history and models
(observed or imagined models) Creating a self-modeling system
* Live modeling: immediate, participant modeling
* Vicarious modeling: latent learning
* Symbolic modeling: verbal knowledge acquired
* Internal modeling: self-modeling
* The outcome expectancy
- A foresightful reasoning (if a then b)
instead of trial-and-error actions.
- An insightful hetero- and auto- referencing
in the monitoring, assessment and control
of moral choices.

While learning from our history and from
the history of others (social models) -
we gradually create our personal
self-modeling (self-referencing) system:
- self-image,
- self-monitoring,
- self-evaluation and
- self-regulation.
The notion of the psyche is back in psychology!