Rotter & Mischel - Cognitive Social Learning Theory

I just want to throw up lookin' at the overview of this theory, it's just too many to take in. I can't do this :(

Okay. Chill. Relax. You can do this, tik!

Rotter = Skinner

Mischel = Bandura & Rotter

So, Rotter contends that human behavior is best predicted from an understanding the interaction of people with their meaningful environments. As an interaction, he believes that neither the environment itself nor the individual is completely responsible for behavior. Instead, he holds that people’s cognitions, past histories, and expectations of the future are keys to predicting behavior. In this respect, he differs

from Skinner, who believed that reinforcement ultimately stems from the environment.

Mischel’s cognitive social theory has much in common with Bandura’s social cognitive theory and Rotter’s social learning theory. Like Bandura and Rotter, Mischel believes that cognitive factors, such as expectancies, subjective perceptions, values, goals, and personal standards, play important roles in shaping personality. His contributions to personality theory have evolved from research on delay of gratification,

to research regarding the consistency or inconsistency of personality, and presently to work with Yuichi Shoda on the development of a cognitive-affective personality system.

Q: What are the 5 basic assumptions of Rotter's Social Learning Theory?

A:  Social learning theory rests on five basic hypotheses. 

1. First, it assumes that humans interact with their meaningful environments. People’s reaction to environmental stimuli depends on the meaning or importance that they attach to an event. Reinforcements are not dependent on external stimuli alone but are given meaning by the individual’s cognitive capacity. Likewise, personal characteristics such as needs or traits cannot, by themselves, cause behavior. Rather, Rotter believes that human behavior stems from the interaction of environmental and personal factors.
2. A second assumption of Rotter’s theory is that human personality is learned. Thus, it follows that personality is not set or determined at any particular age of development; instead, it can be changed or modified as long as people are capable of learning. Although our accumulation of earlier experiences gives our personality some stability, we are always responsive to change through new experiences. We learn from past experiences, but those experiences are not absolutely constant; they are colored by intervening experiences that then affect present perceptions.
3. The third assumption of social learning theory is that personality has a basic unity, which means that people’s personalities possess relative stability. People learn to evaluate new experiences on the basis of previous reinforcement. This relatively consistent evaluation leads to greater stability and unity of personality.
4. Rotter’s fourth basic hypothesis is that motivation is goal directed. He rejects the notion that people are primarily motivated to reduce tension or seek pleasure, insisting that the best explanation for human behavior lies in people’s expectations that their behaviors are advancing them toward goals. For example, most college students have a goal of graduation and are willing to endure stress, tension, and hard work in order to reach that goal. Rather than reducing tension, the prospect of several difficult years of college classes promises to increase it. Other things being equal, people are most strongly reinforced by behaviors that move them in the direction of anticipated goals. This statement refers to Rotter’s empirical law of effect, which “defines reinforcement as any action, condition, or event which affects the individual’s movement toward a goal” (Rotter & Hochreich, 1975, p. 95).
5. Rotter’s fifth assumption is that people are capable of anticipating events. Moreover, they use their perceived movement in the direction of the anticipated event as a criterion for evaluating reinforcers.

SPECIFIC BEHAVIOR

Q: What are the variables to predict specific behavior?

A: Because Rotter’s primary concern is the prediction of human behavior, he suggested four variables that must be analyzed in order to make accurate predictions in any specific situation.

1. BP (Behavior Potential): the possibility that a particular response will occur at a given time and place.
2. E (Expectancy): refers to a person’s expectation that some specific reinforcement or set of reinforcements will occur in a given situation. Expectancy can be general or specific. Generalized expectancies (GEs) are 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. For example, college students whose previous hard work has been reinforced by high grades will have a generalized expectancy of future reward and will work hard in a variety of academic situations. Specific expectancies are designated as E' (E prime). In any situation the expectancy for a particular reinforcement is determined by a combination of a specific expectancy (E') and the generalized expectancy (GE). For example, a student may have general expectancy that a given level of academic work will be rewarded by good grades but may believe that an equal amount of hard work in a French class will go unrewarded.
3. RV (Reinforcement Value): the preference a person attaches to any reinforcement when the probabilities for the occurrence of a number of different reinforcements are all equal. Reinforcement value can be illustrated by a woman’s interactions with a vending machine that contains several possible selections, each costing the same. The woman approaches the machine able and is willing to pay 75 cents in order to receive a snack. The vending machine is in perfect working condition, so there is a 100% probability that the woman’s response will be followed by some sort of reinforcement. Her expectancy of reinforcement, therefore, for the candy bar, corn chips, potato chips, popcorn, tortilla chips, and Danish pastry are all equal. Her response—presses—is determined by the reinforcement value of each snack. 
4. S (Psychological Situation): defined as that part of the external and internal world to which a person is responding. It is not synonymous with external stimuli, although physical events are usually important to the psychological situation.

Q: What determines the reinforcement value for any event, condition, or action?

A: Things that determine the reinforcement value are:

1. First, the individual’s perception contributes to the positive or negative value of an event. Rotter calls this perception internal reinforcement and distinguishes it from external reinforcement, which refers to events, conditions, or actions on which one’s society or culture places a value. Internal and external reinforcements may be either in harmony or at a variance with one another. For example, if you like popular movies—that is, the same ones that most other people like—then your internal and external reinforcements for attending these types of movies are in agreement. However, if your taste in movies runs contrary to that of your friends, then your internal and external reinforcements are discrepant.
2. Another contributor to reinforcement value is one’s needs. Generally, a specific reinforcement tends to increase in value as the need it satisfies becomes stronger. A starving child places a higher value on a bowl of soup than does a moderately hungry one.
3. Reinforcements are also valued according to their expected consequences for future reinforcements. Rotter believes that 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. Reinforcements seldom occur independently of future related reinforcements but are likely to appear in reinforcement-reinforcement sequences, which Rotter refers to as clusters of reinforcement.

Q: What is the basic of Specific Behavior Prediction Formula?

A: 

GENERAL BEHAVIOR

Q: What are the variables to predict general behavior?

A: To predict general behaviors, we look at David, who has worked for 18 years in Hoffman’s

Hardware Store. David has been informed that, because of a business decline, Mr. Hoffman must cut his workforce and that David may lose his job. (poor David..) How can we predict David’s subsequent behavior? Will he beg Mr. Hoffman to let him remain with the company? Will he strike out in violence against the store or Mr. Hoffman? Will he displace his anger and act aggressively toward his wife or children? Will he begin drinking heavily and become apathetic toward searching for a new job? Will

he immediately and constructively begin looking for another position?

1. Generalized expectancies: Predicting David’s reaction to the probable loss of a job is a matter of knowing how he views the options available to him and also the status of his present needs.
2. Needs: any behavior or set of behaviors that people see as moving them in the direction of a goal.  When focus is on the environment, Rotter speaks of goals; when it is on the person, he talks of needs.

Q: What are the 6 categories of needs?

A: Rotter and Hochreich (1975) listed six broad categories of needs, with each category representing a group of functionally related behaviors: that is, behaviors that lead to the same or similar reinforcements.

1. Recognition-Status: The need to be recognized by others and to achieve status in their eyes is a powerful need for most people.
2. Dominance: The need to control the behavior of others
3. Independence: the need to be free of the domination of others
4. Protection-dependency: the needs to be cared for by others, to be protected from frustration and harm, and to satisfy the other need categories.
5. Love and affection: needs for acceptance by others that go beyond recognition and status to include some indications that other people have warm, positive feelings for them.
6. Physical comfort: the most basic need. This need includes those behaviors aimed at securing food, good health, and physical security.

Q: What are the three needs components?

A: A need complex has three essential components—need potential, freedom of movement, and need value—and these components are analogous to the more specific concepts of behavior potential, expectancy, and reinforcement value.

1. Need Potential (NP): refers to the possible occurrence of a set of functionally related behaviors directed toward satisfying the same or similar goals. Need potential is analogous to the more specific concept of behavior potential. The difference between the two is that need potential refers to a group of functionally related behaviors, whereas behavior potential is the likelihood that a particular behavior will occur in a given situation in relation to a specific reinforcement.
2. Freedom of Movement (FM): one’s overall expectation of being reinforced for performing those behaviors that are directed toward satisfying some general need. FM = E.
3. Need Value (NV):  the degree to which she or he prefers one set of reinforcements to another.

Q: What is the basic of General Behavior Prediction Formula?

A: NP = f (FM + NV )

Basically NP = BP, FM = E, and NV = RV

Q: What is Maladaptive Behavior?

A: Maladaptive behavior in Rotter’s social learning theory is any persistent behavior that fails to move a person closer to a desired goal. It frequently, but not inevitably, arises from the combination of high need value and low freedom of movement: that is, from goals that are unrealistically high in relation to one’s ability to achieve them.

In summary, maladjusted individuals are characterized by unrealistic goals, inappropriate behaviors, inadequate skills, or unreasonably low expectancies of being able to execute the behaviors necessary for positive reinforcement.

Q: What is the background of Cognitive-Affective Personality System?

A: 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 (Mischel, 1958, 1961a, 1961b) led him to believe that behavior was largely a function of

the situation.

Q: What is Consistency Paradox?

A: 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 consistency paradox.

Q: What is the Cognitive-Affective Personality System?

A: To solve the classical consistency paradox, Mischel and Shoda proposed a cognitive-affective personality system (CAPS; also called a cognitive-affective processing system) that accounts for variability across situations as well as stability of behavior within a person.

Q: What is the Cognitive-Affective Unit?

A: Cognitive-affective units include all those psychological, social, and physiological aspects of people that cause them to interact with their environment with a relatively stable pattern of variation. These units include people’s (1) encoding strategies, (2) competencies and self-regulatory strategies, (3) expectancies and beliefs, (4) goals and values, and (5) affective responses.

1. Encoding strategies: people’s ways of categorizing information received from external stimuli.
2. Competencies and self-regulatory strategies: How we behave depends in part on the potential behaviors available to us, our beliefs of what we can do, our plans and strategies for enacting behaviors, and our expectancies for success. Our beliefs in what we can do relate to our competencies. Mischel used the term “competencies” to refer to that vast array of information we acquire about the world and our relationship to it. Mischel believes that people use self-regulatory strategies to control their own behavior through self-imposed goals and self-produced consequences. People do not require external rewards and punishments to shape their behavior; they can set goals for themselves and then reward or criticize themselves contingent upon whether their behavior moves them in the direction of those goals.
3. Expectancy and Beliefs: How people behave depends on their specific expectancies and beliefs about the consequences of each of the different behavioral possibilities. Knowledge of people’s hypotheses or beliefs concerning the outcome of any situation is a better predictor of behavior than is knowledge of their ability to perform.
4. Goals and Values: People do not react passively to situations but are active and goal directed. They formulate goals, devise plans for attaining their goals, and in part create their own situations.
5. Affective Responses: Affective responses, then, do not exist in isolation. Not only are they inseparable from cognitive processes, but also they influence each of the other cognitive-affective units.