Bandura

Unlike the behaviourists who wouldn’t accept mentalistic explanations, the social behaviourists like Bandura used cognitive constructs to explain the acquisition, retention, maintenance and modification of behaviour. Evidence for our ability to maintain and manipulate mental models includes insight; even apes will look at apparatus for some time then suddenly put all the pieces together quickly to solve a problem. Bandura explained development of personality through conditioning, extending the concept to include observational learning. Through pairing of our own or observed others’ behaviour and reinforcement, we don’t so much strengthen or weaken our response as learn relationships between our behaviour and the environment. Through vicarious and operant reinforcement, we develop ideas about our own self-efficacy, our ability to control events that affect our lives. Even when we are quite able to perform a response, and it is likely to result in reinforcement (outcome expectancy), we may not perform it if we lack faith in our abilities –self-efficacy- and this goes some way to explaining individual differences in behaviour.

Bandura did not see behaviour as being directly determined by immediate environment, but more a triadic reciprocal determinism between person and cognitive factors, environment and behaviour. In any situation one or more of these factors could assume more importance, e.g. environment’s most important if your boat’s capsizing, cognitive factors if you’re playing a musical instrument for self-satisfaction.

In the modelling experiment, children were shown an actor behaving aggressively towards a doll using implements in quite idiosyncratic ways (in one experiment I read children saw an actor switch on a light with his elbow). When later provided with the apparatus they proceeded to repeat the actor’s actions. The media –cartoon, film, real-life- made no difference. If the actor was seen to be punished for his actions, the children did not repeat the behaviour seen, but if then given incentives to do what they’d seen they could, thus distinguishing between acquisition from observation and performance. Children were more likely to imitate the actor given that they were of the same sex, the behaviours were considered gender appropriate, the actor was perceived as nurturant, the actor had the power to distribute reward, the actor was successful in their intended aim, there was perceived similarity in appearance and background. Similar vicarious learning occurs in older college students. They were required to mark a unbeknownst-to-them experimenter’s-confederate’s essay by giving them electric shocks. The college students were all given, say, 8 shocks themselves for their own essay, then shown a film showing either justified violence, unjustified violence or no violence. Those that saw the justified violence shocked more than those that had seen unjustified violence, and those that had seen no violence gave the least electric shocks. Modelling has also been shown to be important in self-reward. Children saw a model rewarding herself sparingly for good performance in a game. When they were allowed to play the game and given an unlimited source of sweets, they too rewarded themselves sparingly. When they were shown another model whose behaviour contradicted the first by rewarding herself generously for even quite weak performances, the spread across the amount of reward children gave themselves increased.

How can we increase self-efficacy? Well, subgoals help, e.g. in losing weight. 1) Performance achievement, task mastery helps, though beliefs about your efficacy, e.g. me with my, “I can’t give up smoking” though I can’t see why not, are quite resistant to change once formed. I’ve given up for a week and still not felt I could continue. 2) Vicarious efficacy helps, if you see someone you perceive to be similar to yourself doing it. This might explain the success of self-help groups. But if you see someone similar to yourself fail, your beliefs about your own self-efficacy diminish. 3) Verbal persuasion can help, though if someone persuades you that you can do something and you fail your faith in that person goes down. 4) Emotional arousal is a factor. Depending on the amount of arousal and the situation it can be a help or a hindrance, e.g. if you’re driving on an icy road, even though you might panic at the idea normally, your efficacy might go up because it’s a real danger. Bandura also made a point about physiology being important because we get feedback on our performance through physiological responses.

Assessment according to this theory is behaviourist in the sense of discovering and measuring the relationships between antecedent events and behaviour rather than a questionnaire.

Self-efficacy ideas have been shown to be important e.g. in being related to female achievement in male-dominated careers, whether alcoholics give up alcohol, health measures like using safe sex and how soon you seek treatment when you’re ill.

Therapy ideas include modelling, useful in e.g. child development and parenting (do as I do, not as I say), teaching eye contact to autistic children, phobias (though not as useful as the next technique I’m going to mention), alcoholism (e.g. you can cope at a party without a drink).

Successive mastery has proven very useful in phobias.

In terms of comprehensiveness, with very few additional constructs, social behaviourism can explain much more behaviour than behaviourism, e.g. why often behave in ways that don’t seem appropriate to our immediate environment.

In terms of precision and testability, although the concept of self-efficacy is quite vague, as it’s measured behaviourally and developing people’s ideas of their own efficacy does seem to help them behaviourally, it does provide a quantitative measure of say therapy success.

In terms of parsimony, social behaviourism adds only a few cognitive constructs to explain much more.

In terms of empirical validity, there have been many studies on modelling showing vicarious learning to be a valid construct.

In terms of heuristic value, it’s generated a lot of research in the clinical and social psychology settings.

In terms of applied value, modelling, and graded mastery (and to a lesser degree flooding in phobias, which social psychology would say changes your beliefs about behaviour-reinforcement contingencies) have had proven effect on normal and abnormal child development, phobias, alcoholism, giving up smoking, and might explain the success of self-help groups.

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