Lysak exam 3 material Flashcards
Cognitive Social Learning Perspective Major Assumptions (5 THINGS)
- Agreements with behaviorists:
a. personality is formed through interaction with the environment
b. also agree that behavior is situation specific
- Agreements with behaviorists:
- Include more elaborate descriptions of cognitive processes: instead of focusing on condition, focus more on cognitive processes and how we make sense of what is around us
- Argue that people differ in their thought processes
- Can change personality by changing your thought patterns
- Nomothetic approach: focuses more on groups
- Consistency paradox
a. Most people subscribe to trait and dispositional strategy to describe people
b. 2 types of consistency:
i. 1. Cross-situational consistency: consistency ACROSS situations and across time
1. ex: someone very consistent in generosity
ii. 2. Temporal consistency: refers to consistency WITHIN situations across time
1. ex: in a small class that involves a lot of discussion and there is one student who is consistently verbally aggressive
iii. ***problem is that Mischel believed that temporal consistency is often mislabeled as cross-situational consistency
1. ex: when you see the verbally aggressive kid outside of class you assume that he is going to be that way in many other settings
- Cognitive person variables
- Cognitive person variables
- Refers to qualities that influence how you process information about the environment and react to the environment
- 5 variables:
. Competencies
i. Refers to what a person knows and what a person can do (what we are capable of doing)
ii. Not static knowledge, but really active processes
iii. Set of skills
iv. Differences between different people reflect variation in their different competencies
v. Ex: people may act in introverted way because they lack the social skills to be extroverted
vi. Involve combination of 2 different types of knowledge:
1. 1. Declarative knowledge: knowledge that we can state in words
2. 2. Procedural knowledge: cognitive or behavioral capacities that you may have without being able to articulate the exact nature of the capacities
a. ex: might be good at cheering up a friend who is sad but you cant describe in words what you do that is successful at cheering someone up
vii. context specificity: some competencies are relative to some situations but irrelevant to others
1. ex: may have excellent study skills but that doesn’t help you get a date
o 2. Encoding strategies and personal constructs
- How we see things: people differ in how they group and label events and how they organize, store and transform information
- Encoding strategies can be changed→ which accounts for inconsistencies in behavior
o 3. Expectancies
• refers to what we think will happen
• our expectancies are often based on past experiences
• 3 different kinds of expectancies:
• 1. Stimulus-outcome expectancy: expectation about how events will develop in the world (anticipation that one environmental effect will be followed by another)
o ex: hear a siren that is followed by an emergency vehicle
• 2. Behavior-outcome expectancy: expectation about what will happen if you behave in a particular way
o link btw actions and consequences
• 3. Self-efficacy expectancy: your belief that you can perform a particular behavior
o you believe you can do well on the exam than that will help you on the exam
o 4. Subjective stimulus values
- refers to the preferences you have for certain objects or outcomes compared to others
- answer to the question: “what is worth having or doing?”
- ex: some people like going to review sessions and some don’t
o 5. Self-regulatory systems and plans
• refers to our need to make plans, to set goals
• how do we attain our goals
• refers to a certain amount of willpower because you are doing what you need to do to make that goal happen
o ex: putting all 5 variables together:
• Diane and Don are participating in softball game
• Diane is good at softball but Don is okay
• Don sees softball as having fun and having beers after but Diane is very serious
• Expectancies are same—both want a high five after home run
• Diane wants trophy but Don wants a beer
• Examples of therapies:
• Participant modeling
o When you treat phobias, Ex: if a kid is afraid of dogs, watches someone else play with a dog, so then they try it themselves
o Works better than just symbolic modeling
• Symbolic modeling
o Watch someone else engage in behavior, but do not do it yourself
o Exclusively vicarious learning
• General psychotherapy
o Offering encouragement, different suggestions, step by step instructions
o Verbal persuasion
• Relaxation exercises, biofeedback training
o Meditations
o Trying to change internal cues
o Utilizing emotional arousal
- Observational learning
o Occurs when one person performs an action and the other observes and the observer can repeat the behavior
• Allows people to pack huge amounts of information into their memories very quickly
• Occurs as early as the first year of life
• Very simple
o Three stages
Exposure
• Being exposed to another person’s behavior, modeling cues
• 2. Acquisition
• Learn and remember the modeling cues
• Need to store the memory
• 3. Acceptance
• Whether the observer uses the modeling cues as a guide for his/her actions
• See friend do 21 shots for their birthday and almost die, for your 21st bday you may not want to do 21 shots
o Modeling and sex role acquisition
• Sex roles = behavioral qualities that people see as more desirable, or more appropriate in one sex than in the other
• Stereotypes in our society
• Knowledge or sex stereotypes is acquired very early in life
• Little kids know that car repaires are made by men, dishes by women
• Where do stereotypes come from?
• Observational learning
o Boys watch dad change oil encode that
o Girls watch mom do laundry
• Same-sex vs. opposite-sex models
• Kids encode more from same-sex models than opposite sex models
• Like and identify more with same sex parent (more likely to pay attention to them)
• Still learn a great deal of opposite sex role behavior, but they don’t engage in behavior, which goes back to the acquisition vs acceptance conditions
- Modeling and delay of gratification
o Study by Bandura and Mischel (1965)
o 4th and 5th graders took a pretest, grouped into high delay of reward or low delay of reward
• If you could have an ok reward now or a great reward if you wait
o Three conditions
• 1. Child watched adult model making choices opposite of child’s preferences
• If kids was in low delay category, child watched adult making high delay choices
• 2. Child didn’t watch the adult, child just read about adult models choices, which were the opposite of the child’s
• 3. Control group, no modeling, no reading
o Results
• Exposure to model who chose immediate reward increased the tendency of delay referring children to choose immediate reward too
• The opposite was true too
• Kids who watched model, the kids changed their minds significantly more than kids who just read about it
• Tendencies→ changes were maintained a month later
o Effect of vicarious reinforcement
• During study, the model verbalized why they were making the choice, explained why it was reinforcing to them
- People as scientists
o The best way to understand personality is to understand that we are scientists- we all have a need to understand what takes place around us
o Fundamental postulate: people’s behavior, thoughts, and feelings are determined by the constructs they use to anticipate or predict events
o Kelly believed that humans are very active organisms—his theory is concerned with active processes and how we think about things and the constructs we create (not interested in static personality structures)
- Personal construct theory
o A construct is an interpretation of an event—really a unique personal perspective on how the world works and how to make sense of the world
o “event”= anything in your experience; broad definition
• can refer to objects, people, experiences, feelings, etc
o idea is that you are generating a set of personal constructs in your mind and you impose your own unique perspective or reality on the world around you (reality)
o all events in life are open to multiple interpretations→ “constructive alternativism”
• ex: student who rarely goes out on Friday night but would rather study—one student might look at him and say, “what a nerd”, or “what a loser” but someone else might say, “wow he is going to get the best job offer”
o personal constructs are always unique to the individual; however, the labels that we use for the constructs are NOT unique (2 constructs with the same label used by 2 different people may not necessarily have the same meaning
• the unique constructs is what makes your unique personality**
o sometimes constructs are valid and sometimes they aren’t→ “predictive efficiency”- how well does my construct anticipate events
• if a construct does not effectively anticipate events, then your construct is not valid
• if it doesn’t have good predictive efficiency, you can either change it or get rid of it
o 1. Dichotomy
- we have a limited number of constructs and they are dichotomous
- a construct consists of a pair of opposing characteristics (friendly person vs. unfriendly, polite vs. rude, etc
- emergent pole vs. implicit pole:
- emergent pole: pole you are applying to the event that you are construing
- implicit pole: the pole that is not actively being applied
- ex: emergent pole is sexy for Harrison Ford and not sexy is the implicit pole
- **very impt that you apply the opposite pole in every situation (need to understand the meaning of the opposite pole)
- two poles are mutually exclusive (no middle ground, and no continuum)
- poles are determined by individuals (whatever the person views them to be which is part of what makes each persons constructs unique)
- also the opposite poles may be different than what most people think (opposite of beautiful for one person can be ugly but for another person it could be mean)
- “slot movement”: refers to an abrupt change from one pole of a construct to its opposite; often precipitated from stress
- ex: Heroin addict who makes a huge change in his life for the better
o 2. Construction
- “a person anticipates events by construing their replications”→ means that you anticipate events by your interpretation of prior events; notice similarities and differences among different events and how it relates to the current event that you are trying to make sense of
- constructs reflect qualities that recur and show up repeatedly
- rare for a construct to emerge from a single event—life would be chaotic if we weren’t able to identify events that remain relatively stable
o 3. Choice
• when presented with events, we need to make 2 decisions:
• 1. Choose which construct to use to make sense of event
• 2. Choose which pole of that construct to use (emergent or implicit pole)
• when you are making this choice, you can either be safe or take a risk:
• 1. Definition: occurs during ordinary use of a construct: applying a construct in a very familiar way to an event that it is very likely to fit
• 2. Extension: little more risky—involves using a construct to predict an event for which it has been used before
o greater potential for predictive error; however, if you use extension and a construct predicts well in unfamiliar territory, then the construct worked well for you and is more valuable
• constructs that are permeable can be easily applied to new events—more capable of being modified to new extensions
• both definition and extension are helpful and useful and necessary
• what choice do you make?
• Individual differences→ some people are chronically more likely than others to conceptualize things in a new way (more likely to engage in extension)
o other people are concerned with security and stability (more likely to engage in definition)
• temporary situational factors→ if you are really stressed out or fearful, you are more likely to engage in definition
o or if you are really bored, then you may be more willing to engage in extension
o 4. Range
- each construct is only applicable to a limited range of events
- sometimes we counter events for which we don’t have a personal construct
- range of convenience: refers to a set of events for which a construct is useful
- if you try to apply a construct that is outside the range of convenience then your predictability goes down
- focus of convenience: refers to a set of events for which a construct is most predictive
o 5. Modulation
- how easily can a persons constructs be applied to new experiences
- permeability: refers to the degree to which a constructs range of convenience can be altered to include new events
- if a construct is permeable, then you are more likely to be open minded
o 6. Organization
- There are ordinal relationships between constructs
- They are interrelated in an organized, coherent fashion
- Constructs are arranged in hierarchy
- Super-ordinate level of good vs bad then below that, generous vs. stingy and broken vs. unbroken
- Hierarchical arrangement is not permanently fixed—only preserved if it has good predictive efficiency
- One way you can alter constructs to increase predictive efficiency is to rearrange the hierarchy
- Different organization of constructs leads to individual differences—might have same constructs but different organizations (leads to unique personality)
o 7. Individuality
- Each individual creates his or her own unique understanding of reality independent of everyone else’s
- Important to realize that words don’t mean the same thing to one person as they do to another
- How do we communicate if we each have independent understanding of world around us?
- People’s constructs aren’t TOTALLY divergent from those of others
- Constructs probably have enough similarity that you can communicate
- Reason why constructs have some similarity is because that way they tend to have better predictive efficiency
- how do we get to know others—really a matter of testing your constructs against theirs (if you both think idea of fun Saturday night is staying in studying, you’ll get along well)
- Assessment of personal constructs
o Tough—cant observe and people have difficulty describing their constructs
• Not easy to label—know instinctually but can’t put into words
• Or if you can put it into words, you’re not good at communicating what its actually about
• Construct labels are often too general too—don’t get a lot of specific meaning and others might not actually understand
o Role Construct Repertory Test (Rep Test)—devised to get people to display their constructs
• Widely used; variable
• Limitations:
• Still need to provide labels for constructs in the grid
• Easily verbalized constructs are more likely to be reported
