Bandura - Social Cognitive

If I hear Bandura, the thing that I remembered is The Bobo Doll experiment. Damn, I'm so sleepy I can't even think of an introduction, I'm just getting into the lesson right on.

Q: Who is Albert Bandura?

A: 

Q: What is Bobo Doll Experiment?

A: Bobo doll experiment, groundbreaking study on aggression led by psychologist Albert Bandura that demonstrated that children are able to learn through the observation of adult behavior. The experiment was executed via a team of researchers who physically and verbally abused an inflatable doll in front of preschool-age children, which led the children to later mimic the behavior of the adults by attacking the doll in the same fashion.

Q: What is Learning Theory?

A: One of the earliest and most basic assumptions of Bandura’s social cognitive theory is that humans are quite flexible and capable of learning a multitude of attitudes, skills, and behaviors and that a good bit of those learnings are a result of vicarious experiences. Although people can and do learn from direct experience, much of what they learn is acquired through observing others.

Q: What is Observational Learning?

A: Bandura believes that observation allows people to learn without performing any behavior. People observe natural phenomena, plants, animals, waterfalls, the motion of the moon and stars, and so forth; but especially important to social cognitive theory is the assumption that they learn through observing the behavior of other people. Bandura believes that observational learning is much more efficient than learning through direct experience.

Q: What is Modelling?

A: The core of observational learning is modeling. Learning through modeling involves adding and subtracting from the observed behavior and generalizing from one observation to another. In other words, modeling involves cognitive processes and is not simply mimicry or imitation. It is more than matching the actions of another; it involves symbolically representing information and storing it for use at a future time.

Several factors determine whether a person will learn from a model in any particular

situation. 

1. First, the characteristics of the model are important. People are more likely to model high-status people rather than those of low status, competent individuals rather than unskilled or incompetent ones, and powerful people rather than impotent ones.
2. Second, the characteristics of the observer affect the likelihood of modeling. People who lack status, skill, or power are most likely to model. Children model more than older people, and novices are more likely than experts to model.
3. Third, the consequences of the behavior being modeled may have an effect on the observer. The greater the value an observer places on a behavior, the more likely the observer will acquire that behavior. Also, learning may be facilitated when the observer views a model receiving severe punishment; for example, seeing another person receive a severe shock from touching an electric wire teaches the observer a valuable lesson.

Q: What are the processes governing observational learning?

A: Bandura (1986) recognizes four processes that govern observational learning: attention,

representation, behavioral production, and motivation.

1. Attention: Before we can model another person, we must attend to that person. What factors regulate attention? (1), because we have more opportunities to observe individuals with whom we frequently associate, we are most likely to attend to these people, (2) attractive models are more likely to be observed than unattractive ones are—popular figures on television, in sports, or in movies are often closely attended, (3) the nature of the behavior being modeled affects our attention—we observe behavior that we think is important or valuable to us.
2. Representation:  In order for observation to lead to new response patterns, those patterns must be symbolically represented in memory. It can use of imagery or verbal coding.
3. Behavioral production: After attending to a model and retaining what we have observed, we then produce the behavior. In converting cognitive representations into appropriate actions, we must ask ourselves several questions about the behavior to be modeled. First, we ask, “How can I do this?” After symbolically rehearsing the relevant responses, we try out our new behavior. While performing, we monitor ourselves with the question “What am I doing?” Finally, we evaluate our performance by asking, “Am I doing this right?”
4. Motivation: Observational learning is most effective when learners are motivated to perform the modeled behavior.

Q: What is Enactive Learning?

A: Every response a person makes is followed by some consequence. Some of these consequences are satisfying, some are dissatisfying, and others are simply not cognitively attended and hence have little effect. Bandura believes that complex human behavior can be learned when people think about and evaluate the consequences of their behaviors. 

The consequences of a response serve at least three functions. (1) response consequences inform us of the effects of our actions. We can retain this information and use it as a guide for future actions. (2) the consequences of our responses motivate our anticipatory behavior; that is, we are capable of symbolically representing future outcomes and acting accordingly. (3) the consequences of responses serve to reinforce behavior.

Q: What is Triadic Reciprocal Causation?

A: Bandura's social cognitive theory explains psychological functioning in terms of triadic reciprocal causation. This system assumes that human action is a result of an interaction among three variables—environment, behavior, and person.

Q: What is Human Agency?

A: Human agency is an active process of exploring, manipulating, and influencing the environment in order to attain desired outcomes.

 

Q: What are four core features of human agency?

A: Bandura discusses four core features of human agency: intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness.

1. Intentionality: refers to acts a person performs intentionally. An intention includes planning, but it also involves actions.
2. Forethought: to set goals, to anticipate likely outcomes of their actions, and to select behaviors that will produce desired outcomes and avoid undesirable ones.
3. Self-reactiveness: people not only make choices but they monitor their progress toward fulfilling those choices.
4. Self-reflectiveness: they are examiners of their own functioning; they can think about and evaluate their motivations, values, and the meanings of their life goals, and they can think about the adequacy of their own thinking. People’s most crucial self-reflective mechanism is self-efficacy: that is, their beliefs that they are capable of performing actions that will produce a desired effect.

Q: What is Self-Efficacy?

A: Bandura defined self-efficacy as “people’s beliefs in their capability to exercise some measure of control over their own functioning and over environmental events”. Bandura contends that “efficacy beliefs are the foundation of human agency”. People who believe that they can do something that has the potential to alter environmental events are more likely to act and more likely to be successful

than those people with low self-efficacy.

Q: What is the difference between Self-Efficacy and Outcome Expectations?

A: Self-efficacy is not the expectation of our action’s outcomes. Bandura distinguished between efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. Efficacy refers to people’s confidence that they have the ability to perform certain behaviors, whereas an outcome expectancy refers to one’s prediction of the likely consequences of that behavior.

Q: What Contributes to Self-Efficacy?

A: Personal efficacy is acquired, enhanced, or decreased through any one or combination of four sources: (1) mastery experiences, (2) social modeling, (3) social persuasion, and (4) physical and emotional states.

Q: What is Proxy Agency?

A: Proxy involves indirect control over those social conditions that affect everyday living. So it basically accomplishing their goal by relying on other people.

Q: What is Collective Efficacy?

A: Bandura defined collective efficacy as “people’s shared beliefs in their collective power to produce desired results”. In other words, collective efficacy is the confidence people have that their combined efforts will bring about group accomplishments.

Q: What is Therapy according to Bandura?

A: According to Bandura, deviant behaviors are initiated on the basis of social cognitive learning principles, and they are maintained because, in some ways, they continue to serve a purpose. Therapeutic change, therefore, is difficult because it involves eliminating behaviors that are satisfying to the person. Smoking, overeating, and drinking alcoholic beverages, for example, generally have positive effects initially, and their long-range aversive consequences are usually not sufficient to produce avoidance behavior.

The ultimate goal of social cognitive therapy is self-regulation (Bandura, 1986). To achieve this end, the therapist introduces strategies designed to induce specific behavioral changes, to generalize those changes to other situations, and to maintain those changes by preventing relapse.

The first step in successful therapy is to instigate some change in behavior. A more important level of therapy is to generalize specific changes. The most effective therapy reaches the third level of accomplishment, which is maintenance of newly acquired functional behaviors.

Q: What are basic treatment approaches according to Bandura?

A: Bandura (1986) has suggested several basic treatment approaches. 

1. The first includes overt or vicarious modeling. People who observe live or filmed models performing threatening activities often feel less fear and anxiety and are then able to perform those same activities.
2. In a second treatment mode, covert or cognitive modeling, the therapist trains patients to visualize models performing fearsome behaviors. Overt and covert modeling strategies are most effective, however, when combined with performance oriented approaches.
3. A third procedure, called enactive mastery, requires patients to perform those behaviors that previously produced incapacitating fears.