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Contents |
Social learning theory is derived from the work of Albert Bandura which proposed that observational learning can occur in relation to three models: (15)
• Live model – in which an actual person is demonstrating the desired behavior
• Verbal instruction – in which an individual describes the desired behavior in detail, and instructs the participant in how to engage in the behavior
• Symbolic – in which modeling occurs by means of the media, including, movies, television, Internet, literature, and radio. This type of modeling involves a real or fictional character demonstrating the behavior.
An important factor of Bandura’s social learning theory is the emphasis on reciprocal determinism. This notion states that an individual’s behavior both influenced and is influenced by the environment and characteristics of the person. In other words, a person’s behavior, environment, and personal qualities all reciprocally influence each other. (15) Bandura proposed that the modeling process involves several steps: (15)
1. Attention – in order for an individual to learn something, they must pay attention to the features of the modeled behavior.
2. Retention – humans need to be able to remember details of the behavior in order to learn and later reproduce the behavior.
3. Reproduction – in reproducing a behavior, an individual must organize his or her responses in accordance with the model behavior. This ability can improve with practice.
4. Motivation – there must be an incentive or motivation driving the individual’s reproduction of the behavior. Even if all of the above factors are present, the person will not engage in the behavior without motivation.
Bandura is known for his 1961-1963 experiments utilizing an inflatable clown known as a Bobo doll in order to test modeling behaviors in children. Children were divided into three groups – one of which was exposed to an aggressive adult model, one which was exposed to a passive adult model, and a control group, which was not exposed to an adult model. Adults in the aggressive group were asked to verbally and physically attack the doll, while those in the passive group were asked to play peacefully. Once the children were given the opportunity to play, results showed that those exposed to the aggressive model were more likely to imitate what they had seen, and to behave aggressively toward the doll. It was found that boys were four times more likely than girls to display physical aggression, but levels of verbal aggression were about the same. The results of Bandura’s studies provided support for the influence of modeling on learning. Further, a later study in 1965 showed that witnessing the model being punished for the aggressive behavior decreased the likelihood that children would imitate the behavior. (14)
Julian Rotter moved away from theories based on psychosis and behaviorism, and developed a learning theory. In Social Learning and Clinical Psychology (1954), Rotter suggests that the effect of behavior has an impact on the motivation of people to engage in that specific behavior. People wish to avoid negative consequences, while desiring positive results or effects. If one expects a positive outcome from a behavior, or thinks there is a high probability of a positive outcome, then they will be more likely to engage in that behavior. The behavior is reinforced, with positive outcomes, leading a person to repeat the behavior. This social learning theory suggests that behavior is influenced by these environmental factors or stimuli, and not psychological factors alone.[1]
Albert Bandura[2] expanded on Rotter's idea, as well as earlier work by Miller & Dollard,[3] and is related to social learning theories of Vygotsky and Lave. This theory incorporates aspects of behavioral and cognitive learning. Behavioral learning assumes that people's environment (surroundings) cause people to behave in certain ways. Cognitive learning presumes that psychological factors are important for influencing how one behaves. Social learning suggests that a combination of environmental (social) and psychological factors influence behavior. Social learning theory outlines three requirements for people to learn and model behavior including attention: retention (remembering what one observed), reproduction (ability to reproduce the behavior), and motivation (good reason) to want to adopt the behavior.
Development in Social Learning Theory
Bandura’s mechanisms Physical maturation: physical maturity to replicate observed behavior Experience the world Cognitive Development Note the first of these mechanisms shows little important to social learning theorists These processes are broken down further:
Experience the World: one of the processes Bandura believed humans developed. Experience the world is the process by which individuals learn through watching and perceiving their environment. An individual experiences something in the social world, and interactions occur between individuals, children learn a plethora of behaviors. This allows individuals to learn appropriate situations to act out behaviors. Behavior's are reinforced by other people in our environment, and because of that reinforcement, individuals become motivated to perform behaviors again.
Example: A child is watching Mickey Mouse dance to music on television. The child gets up and begins dancing to the music also. The child's mother walks by and claps for the child who is still dancing along with the music. The child learns this behavior is good preforms his dance moves the next time he hears music.
Bandura’s Conditions for Modeling: Attention: the amount of attention we are capable of utilizing in regards to a specific action Retention: The job of remembering what was paid attention to Reproduction: Repeating the action that was originally paid attention to Motivation: Having a reason to imitate what was seen Reinforcement: the process of encouraging or establishing a belief or pattern of behavior Punishment: the process of discouraging a belief or pattern of behavior.
Two qualities shape behavior: punishment and reinforcement. Each stimulus can have either positive or negative implications toward the individual. Breaking this down further:
Cognitive Development: Children’s perceptions of the world and specific developmental mechanisms (self-efficacy) are formed through both direct experience and the effects formed from their actions. The following change during development
The older a child/individual ages, the longer they can hold attention, the more memory they can retain and the stronger their organizational skills. Example: A child assesses their own internal feelings and confidences about learning the piano, based upon his/her ability to remember to remember how to play, his ability to play overall and innate musical talents.
[5] Social learning theorists take a contextual world-view on development Social context’s on children drive development Behavior is influenced by the environment People act on their environment Individuals filter out their environment based upon their current world-view Individuals create their own environment as they act on their environment Individuals make new behaviors by reorganizing previously learned behaviors Example: A child sees his best friend pick up a piece of trash in the park and throw it away in a nearby trashcan. As the child sees his, he looks around, people are looking at his friend and smiling. The child takes this into consideration and finds another piece of trash and throws it away.
Outline of Developmental Processes across the Lifespan Let’s break this down shall we? Formula of human development according to social learning theory S->O->R (developed by Clark Hall) The stimulus (S) effects the organism (O) which produces a response (R) that is as dependent on (S) as it is on (O). Persons act upon and are acted on by their environment.
This formula breaks down the process by which social learning theory is utilized in real world scenarios. As an individual has a stimulus acted upon them, they produce a response. This is consistent over the lifetime which indicates that social learning is a continuous process in which individual behaviors are shaped by stimuli in their environment and can be affected by an individuals own cognitive development and functioning. Connections between Early and Late Childhood As a child develops, less attention is paid to their capability to repeat an action Older children are expected to acquire new skills quickly, with minimal verbal instructions
Example: Toddlers first learning to use silverware are often repeatedly shown the proper techniques to holding the utensils properly. However, school age children who are first learning to paint will get minimal instruction as they are as they are expected to pick up nonverbal ques more quickly than when they were younger. This demonstrates that different age groups face different social environments based upon their degree of experience.
Example: A child learning how to walk often has to go through various steps prior to walking. The child first has to roll over, then crawl and take minimal steps before they can walk across a room. The child has to learn how to use his/her motor functions to make their appendages move across a room, which make take them till they are over one year old. A amputee patient who is learning to walk with a prosthesis, has the knowledge of move specific parts of their body, but need rehabilitation to assist them with the specific body movements. This can take a few months of physical therapy.
In criminology, Ronald Akers and Robert Burgess developed social learning theory to explain deviancy by combining variables which encouraged delinquency (e.g., the social pressure from delinquent peers) with variables that discouraged delinquency (e.g., the parental response to discovering delinquency in their children)[6].
The first two stages were used by Edwin Sutherland in his Differential Association Theory. Sutherland's model for learning in a social environment depends on the cultural conflict between different factions in a society over who has the power to determine what is deviant. But his ideas were difficult to put into operation and measure quantitatively. Burgess, a behavioral sociologist, and Akers revised Sutherland's theory and included the idea of reinforcement, which increases or decreases the strength of a behavior, and applied the principles of operant psychology, which holds that behavior is a function of its consequences and can be really bad in some cases [7]
Functionalism had been the dominant paradigm but, in the 1960s, there was a shift towards Social Control Theories, conflict criminology, and labeling theories that tried to explain the emerging and more radical social environment. Moreover, people believed that they could observe behavior and see the process of social learning, e.g., parents watched their own children and saw the influence of other children on their own; they could also see what kind of effect they had on their own children, i.e., the processes of differential association and reinforcement. The conservative political parties were advocating an increase in punishment to deter crime. Unlike labeling theory, social learning theory actually supports the use of punishment which translates into longer sentences for those convicted, and helps to explain the increase in the prison population that began in the early 1970s (Livingston, 1996).
Unlike situational crime prevention, the theory ignores the opportunistic nature of crime (Jeffery, 1990: 261–2). To learn one must first observe criminal behavior, but where was this behavior learned? The theory does explain how criminal behavior is "transmitted" from one person to another, which can explain increases in types of crimes, but it does not consider how criminal acting can be prevented (Jeffery, 1990: 252) although it may be fairly assumed that the processes of learning behaviors can be changed.
There is also a definite problem. What may be reinforcement for one person may not be for another. Also, reinforcements can be both social involving attention and behavior between more than one person, and non-social reinforcement which would not involve this interaction (Burgess & Akers: 1966). Social learning theory has been used in mentoring programs that should, in theory, prevent some future criminal behavior. The idea behind mentoring programs is that an adult is paired with a child, who supposedly learns from the behavior of the adult and is positively reinforced for good behavior (Jones-Brown, 1997). In the classroom, a teacher may use the theory by changing the seating arrangements to pair a behaving child and a misbehaving child, but the outcome may be that the behaving child begins behaving badly.
We can explain attachment in terms of the principles of classic conditioning. The food-giver then becomes a source of pleasure.
Hale[8] applied the social learning theory to serial murder using Amsel's frustration theory. In frustration theory, humiliation is the result of a nonreward situation, which is a reward that is not given when a reward had been given in the past. When an individual is conditioned to be rewarded they anticipate it to happen in the future, but when they are presented with a nonreward situation this creates an unconditioned frustration response, otherwise called humiliation. Signs associated with the humiliating experience form a conditioned anticipatory frustration response, which triggers specific internal stimuli. These stimuli prevent an individual from future humiliation. During childhood, serial killers experience many humiliating situations and with unbalanced nonreward situations and no reward situations, they perceive all situations as nonreward and develop the inability to distinguish between the two. They anticipate humiliation in every encounter that they come across. When it comes to choosing their victims serial killers do not go back to the person who caused the humiliation. According to Dollard and (1939, 1950)} theory of learning, the individual is "instigated" toward a behavior, which is some antecedent condition of which the predicted response is the consequences. For a serial killer, frustration gets in the way of an instigated goal and their built up aggression must be released. Their behavior is seen as a delayed and indirect release of aggression. They are unable to release their aggression on their source of frustration and are forced to choose more vulnerable individuals to act on.[9] The child learns to expect humiliation or a negative situation from the past, which then causes frustration or aggression. Jerome Henry Brudos felt he was never accepted by his mother. Brudos transferred his hatred for his mother to other women through his mutilation of their bodies. For Brudos, the murder of strange women served as a catharsis for the humiliation he endured through his mother's rejection.[10] In all of these instances the serial killer was presented with some form of humiliation as a child, and learned to vent their anger through aggression.
The applications of social learning theory have been important in the history of education policies in the United States. The zone of proximal development is used as a basis for early intervention programs such as Head Start. Social learning theory can also be seen in the TV and movie rating system that is used in the United States. The rating system is designed to let all parents know what the programs that their children are watching contain. The ratings are based on age appropriate material to help parents decide if certain content is appropriate for their child to watch. Some content may be harmful to children who do not have the cognitive ability to process certain content, however the child may model the behaviors seen on TV.
Locus of control is an important consideration when helping students in higher education environments perform better academically. Cassandra B. Whyte indicated in the 1970s and 1980s that by encouraging students to accept personal responsibility for their educational outcomes, better academic performance will usually be forthcoming if ability levels are present. More frequent successful academic performance will result as thoughts and belief in the need for personal effort toward the academic task is rewarded. As successful experiences increase in frequency, the student usually incorporates the confidence that hard work often can be rewarded with positive academic outcomes.[11][12]
Guided participation is seen in schools across the United States and all around the world in language classes when the teacher says a phrase and asks the class to repeat the phrase. The other part to guided participation is when the student goes home and practices on their own. Guided participation is also seen with parents who are trying to teach their own children how to speak.
Scaffolding is another technique that is used widely across the United States. Most academic subjects take advantage of scaffolding, however mathematics is one of the best examples. As students move through their education they learn skills in mathematics that they will build on throughout their scholastic careers. A student who has never taken a basic math class and does not understand the principles of addition and subtraction will not be able to understand algebra. The process of learning math is a scaffolding technique because the knowledge builds on itself over time.
Another important application of social learning theory has been in the treatment and conceptualization of anxiety disorders. The classical conditioning approach to anxiety disorder, which spurred the development of behavioral therapy and is considered by some to be the first modern theory of anxiety [16], began to lose steam in the late 1970s as researchers began to question its underlying assumptions. For example, the classical conditioning approach holds that pathological fear and anxiety are developed through direct learning; however, many people with anxiety disorders cannot recall a traumatic conditioning event, in which the feared stimulus was experienced in close temporal and spatial contiguity with an intrinsically aversive stimulus [17; c.f. 18]. Social learning theory helped salvage learning approaches to anxiety disorders by providing additional mechanisms beyond classical conditioning that could account for the acquisition of fear. For example, social learning theory suggests that a child could acquire a fear of snakes, for example, by observing a family remember express fear in response to snakes. Alternatively, the child could learn the associations between snakes and unpleasant bites through direct experience, without developing excessive fear, but could later learn from others that snakes can have deadly venom, leading to a re-evaluation of the dangerousness of snake bites, and accordingly, a more exaggerated fear response to snakes (see 19, for a discussion of similar US re-evaluation effects).
13. BURGESS, R. L., & AKERS, R. L. (1966). A DIFFERENTIAL ASSOCIATION-REINFORCEMENT THEORY OF CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR. Social Problems, 14(2), 128-147.
14. Shuttleworth, M. (Retrieved 2011, Dec 09). Bobo doll experiment. Retrieved from http://www.experiment-resources.com/bobo-doll-experiment.html
15. Mae Sincero, S. (Retrieved 2011, Dec 09). What is social learning theory. Retrieved from http://www.experiment-resources.com/social-learning-theory.html
16. Rachman, S. (1991). Neo-conditioning and the classical theory of fear acquisition. Clinical Psychology Review, 11, 155–173.
17. Mathews, A., Gelder, M. & Johnston, D. (1981). Agoraphobia: Xature L3 Treatment. New York: Guilford Press.
18. Ost, L.G., & Hugdahl, K. (1981). Acquisition of phobias and anxiety response patterns in clinical patients. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 19, 439-447.
19. Mineka, S., & Zinbarg, R. (2006). A contemporary learning theory perspective on the etiology of anxiety disorders: It's not what you thought it was. American Psychologist, 61, 10-26.