Rotter and mischel Flashcards
Overview of Cognitive Social Learning Theory
Both Julian Rotter and Walter Mischel believe that cognitive factors, more than immediate reinforcements, determine how people will react to environmental forces. Both theorists suggest that our expectations of future events are major determinants of performance
Biography of Julian Rotter
Julian Rotter was born in Brooklyn, New York n in 1916. As a high school student, he became familiar with some of the writings of Freud and Adler, but he majored in chemistry rather than psychology while at Brooklyn College. In 1941, he received a PhD in clinical psychology from Indiana University. After World War II, he took a position at Ohio State, where one of his studen ts was Walter Mischel. In 1963, he moved to the University of Connecticut and has remained there since retirement
Introduction to Rotter’s Social Learning Theory
It assumes that humans interact with their meaningful environments: that is, human behavior stems from the interaction of environmental and personal factors.
Human personality is learned, which suggests that it can be changed or modified as long as people are capable of learning.
Personality has a basic unity, suggesting that personality has some basic stability.
Motivation is goal directed
People are capable of anticipating events, and thus they are capable of changing their environment and their personality.
Predicting Specific Behaviors
must be analyzed in order to make accurate predictions in any specific situation.
Behavior Potential
possibility that a particular response will occur at a given time and place in relation to its likely reinforcement.
Expectancy
their confidence that a particular reinforcement will follow a specific behavior in a specific situation or situations. Expectancies can be either general or specific, and the overall likelihood of success is a function of both generalized and specific expectancies.
Reinforcement Value
person’s preference for any particular reinforcement over other reinforcements if all are equally likely to occur. Internal reinforcement is the individual’s perception of an event, whereas external reinforcement refers to society’s evaluation of an event.
Reinforcement sequence
suggest that the value of an event is a function of one’s expectation that a particular reinforcement will lead to future reinforcements.
Psychological Situation
part of the external and internal world to which a person is responding. Behavior is a function of the interaction of people with their meaningful environment.
Predicting General Behaviors
- The basic prediction is too specific to give clues about how a person will generally behave.
Generalized Expectancies
- To make more general predictions of behavior, one must know their expectations based on similar past experiences that a given behavior will be reinforced. It include people’s needs, that is, behaviors that move them toward a goal
Needs
- refer to functionally related categories of behaviors. Rotter listed six broad categories of this, with each need being related to behaviors that lead to the same or similar reinforcements
Recognition
- status refers to the need to excel, to achieve, and to have others recognize one’s worth.
Dominance
- is the need to control the behavior of others, to be in charge, or to gain power over others.
Independence
- is the need to be free from the domination of others.
Protection
- dependence is the need to have others take care of us and to protect us from harm.
Love and affection
- are needs to be warmly accepted by others and to be held in friendly regard.
Physical comfort
- includes those behaviors aimed at securing food, good health, and physical security
Internal and External Control of Reinforcement The Internal - External Control Scale (popularly called “locus of control scale”)
attempts to measure the degree to which people perceive a causal relationship between their own efforts and environmental consequences
Interpersonal Trust Scale
measures the extent to which a person expects the word or promise of another person to be true.
Introduction to Mischel’s Personality System
Like Bandura and Rotter, Mischel believes that cognitive factors, such as expectancies, subjective perceptions, values, goals, and personal standards are important in shaping personality. In his early theory, Mischel seriously questioned the consistency of personality, but more recently, he and Yuichi Shoda have advanced the notion that behavior is also a function of relatively stable cognitive-affective units.
Introduction to Mischel’s Personality System
Like Bandura and Rotter, Mischel believes that cognitive factors, such as expectancies, subjective perceptions, values, goals, and personal standards are important in shaping personality. In his early theory, Mischel seriously questioned the consistency of personality, but more recently, he and Yuichi Shoda have advanced the notion that behavior is also a function of relatively stable cognitive-affective units.
The Consistency Paradox
- refers to the observation that, although both lay people and professionals tend to believe that behavior is quite consistent, research suggests that it is not. Mischel recognizes that, indeed, some traits are consistent over time, but he contends that there is little evidence to suggest that they are consistent from one situation to another.
Person
- Situation Interaction Mischel believes that behavior is best predicted from an understanding of the person, the situation, and the interaction between person and situation. Thus, behavior is not the result of some global personality trait, but rather of people’s perceptions of themselves in a particular situation
Cognitive-Affective Personality System
However, Mischel does not believe that inconsisten cie s in behavior are due solely to the situation; he recognizes tha t inconsistent behaviors reflect stable patterns of variation within a person. He and Shoda see these stable variations in behavior in the following framework: If A, then X; but if B, then Y. People’s pattern of variability is their behavioral signature, or their unique and stable pattern of behaving differently in different situations
Behavior Prediction
- Mischel’s basic theoretical position for predicting and explaining behavior is as follows: If personality is a stable system that processes information about the situation, then as people encounter different situations, they should behave differently as those situations vary. Therefore, Mischel believes that, even though people’s behavior may reflect some stability over time, it tends to vary as situations vary.
Situation Variables
- Include all those stimuli that people attend to in a given situation.
Cognitive-Affective Units
Include all those psychological, social, and physiological aspects of people that permit them to interact with their environment with some stability in their behavior. Mischel identified five such units. First are encoding strategies, or people’s individualized manner of categorizing information they receive from external stimuli. Second are the competencies and self-regulatory strategies. One of the most important of these competencies is intelligence, which Mischel argues is responsible for the apparent consistency of other traits. In addition, people use self-regulatory strategies to control their own behavior through self-formulated goals and self-produced consequences. The third cognitive-affective units are expectancies and beliefs, or people’s guesses about the consequences of each of the different behavioral possibilities. The fourth cognitive-affective unit includes people’s subjective goals and values, which tend to render behavior fairly consistent. Mischel’s fifth cognitive-affective unit includes affective responses, including emotions, feelings, and the affect that accompanies physiological reactions.
Critique of Cognitive Social Learning Theory
Cognitive social learning theory combines the rigors of
learning theory with the speculative assumption that people are
forward-looking beings. It rates high on generating research and on being internally consistent; it rates about average on its ability to be falsified, to organize data, and to guide action.
Generalized expectancies (GEs)
- learned through previous experiences with a particular response or similar responses and are based on the belief that certain behaviors will be followed by positive reinforcement
Concept of Humanity
Rotter and Mischel see people as goal-directed, cognitive animals whose perceptions of events are more crucial than the events themselves. Cognitive social learning theory rates very high on social influences, and high on uniqueness of the individual, free choice, teleology, and conscious processes.
On the dimension of optimism versus pessimism, Rotter’s view is
slightly more optimistic, whereas Mischel’s is about in the middle
Specific expectancies (E’ or E prime)
- in any situation the expectancy for a particular reinforcement is determined by a combination of a specific expectancy and the generalized expectancy
Total expectancy
- a function of both one’s generalized expectancy
Internal reinforcement
- the individual’s perception contributes to the positive or negative value of an event
External reinforcement
- events, conditions, or actions on which one’s society or culture places a value
Reinforcement-reinforcement sequences
- clusters of reinforcement
people are capable of using cognition to anticipate a sequence of events leading to some future goal and that the ultimate goal contributes to the reinforcement value of each event in the sequence
Psychological situation (s)
- a complex pattern of cues that a person perceives during a specific time period
- That part of the external and internal stimuli, although physical events are usually important
BASIC PREDICTION FORMULA
Represents an idealistic rather than a practical means of prediction, and no precise values can be plugged into it
PREDICTING GENERAL BEHAVIORS
The basic prediction too specific to give clues how a person will generally behave
Need potential (NP)
- the possible occurrence of a set of functionally related behavior directed toward satisfying the same or similar goals
- More specific concept of behavior potential
- Refers to a group of functionally related behaviors
- Cannot be measured solely through observation of behavior
- Depends not only on the value or preference one has for that reinforcement but also on one’s freedom of movement in making responses leading to that reinforcement
Freedom of movement
- one’s overall expectation of being reinforced for performing those behaviors that are directed toward satisfying some general need
- Can be determined by holding need value constant and observing one’s need potential
GENERAL PREDICTION FORMULA
● Limited to highly controlled situations where expectancies, reinforcement value, and the psychological situation are all relatively simple and discrete
CHANGING GOALS
Three sources of problems that follow from inappropriate goals:
○ Two or more important goals may be in conflict
○ Destructive goal
○ People set their goals too high and are continually frustrated when they cannot reach or exceed them
ELIMINATING LOW EXPECTANCIES
People may have low freedom of movement for at least three reasons:
○ People may lack the skills or information needed to successfully strive toward their goals
○ Faulty evaluation of the present situation
○ Inadequate generalization
ROTTER’S PSYCHOTHERAPY
therapy is to bring freedom of movement and need value into harmony, thus reducing defensive and avoidance behaviors
Need potential
Freedom of movement
Need value
tree need components
Reinforcement-reinforcement sequences
- clusters of reinforcement
