Unit 16—Bandura: Social Cognitive Theory

Front 1

Define and give examples of observational learning

Back 1

Bandura believes that observation allows people to learn without performing any behaviour.
Assumption of social cognitive theory: people learn through observing.
Diff from Skinner: reinforcement not essential to learning.
More efficient than learning through direct experience.
Learning through observation people are spared countless responses that might be followed by punishment or reinforcement.

Ex. observe characters on tv.

Front 2

A) Modeling: Core of observational learning.

Back 2

Def_ adding and subtracting from observed behaviour and generalizing from one observation to another.
“Mimicry or imitation”
Factors:
1) Characteristics of model are important. High status people, competent. Powerful.
2) Characteristics of the observer. Lack status, skill or power are most likely to model.
3) Consequences of the behaviour being modeled. Greater the value more like ly the observer will acquire the behaviour.

Front 3

List and define the processes governing observational learning.

1) Attention

2) Representation

3) Behavioural Production

4) Motivation

Back 3

1) B4 we model we must first attend to that person. Factors that regulate attention:
More chances to observe people with whom we frequently associate. Attractive models are more likely to be observed. Nature of model being modeled affects our attention.

2) Response patterns must be symbolically represented in memory. Verbal coding speeds the process of observational learning but not necc. Helps us to rehearse the behaviour symbolically. Aids to retention process.

3) 3rd step: we produce behaviour. Convert cognitive representations into appropriate actions. How can I do this? ... we try to perform.... What am I doing? finally, we evaluate... Am I doing this right? Not always easy to answer.

4) Observational learning most effective if person is motivated. Performance is facilitated by motivation to enact the particular behaviour.
Must have desire. ..

Front 4

Define Bandura's concept of triadic reciprocal causation.

Back 4

Assumption: human action is a result of an interaction among 3 variables:

1) Environment
2) Behaviour
3) Person: includes cognitive factors like memory.

People have capacity to re-structure their environment.

Cognition determines which environmental events people attend to.
What value they place on these events and how they organize these events for future use.

Not independent.. but can have causal effect.

Cognition is formed by behaviour and environment. Includes: Gender, physical attractiveness, social position, size and cognitive factors.

Reciprocal relationship. Do not need to be of equal strength.

Front 5

Explain and give at least one example of the effect that chance encounters may have on a person's life path.

Back 5

People can’t predict or anticipate all possible environmental changes.

Chance encounter: unintended meeting of persons unfamiliar to each other.
- influence people only by entering the triadic reciprocal causation paradigm at point E and adding to the mutual interaction of person, behaviour, and environment.
Influence people in same manner as planned events. Once chance encounter occurs people behave toward acquaintance according to their attitudes, belief systems, and interests as well as to the other person's reactions.

Front 6

Explain and give at least one example of the effect that fortuitous events may have on a person's life path.

Back 6

Environmental experience that is unexpected and unintended.
- adds a separate dimension in any scheme used to predict human behaviour.
Ex. Maslow: Maslow was painfully shy around women. Same time in love with cousin Bertha. Too bashful to express his love. Bertha’s older sister pushed him toward his cousin “kiss her”. Bertha kissed back. From that moment his life changed.

Front 7

Define and discuss Bandura's concept of human agency.

Back 7

Bandura: people are self-regulating, proactive, self-reflective, and self-organizing. They have power to influence their own actions to produce desired consequences.
Does not mean : people are able to make decisions that are consistent with their view of self. Nor does it mean that people react automatically to external and internal events.
It is an active process of exploring, manipulating and influencing the environment in order to attain desired outcomes.

Front 8

Define and discuss Bandura's concept of human agency.
con't ...

a) Intentionality

b) Forethought

c) self-reactiveness

d) self-reflectiveness

Back 8

Core features:

a) acts a person performs intentionally. includes: planning.

b) set goals to anticipate likely outcomes of their actions and to select behaviours that will produce desired outcomes and avoid undesirable ones.

c) process of motivating and regulating own actions. Goals must be specific. and within a person’s ability to achieve them, reflect potential accomplishments that are not too far in the future.

d) Think about and evaluate their motivations, values and meaning of their lives.

Front 9

Define and give examples of self-efficacy.

Back 9

people’s beliefs in their capability to exercise some control over their own functioning and over environmental events.
Foundation of human agency.
People’s beliefs in their personal efficacy influence what course of action they choose to pursue.
Not: the expectation of our actions outcomes. Efficacy refers to people’s confidence the person has ability to perform certain behaviour. vs Outcomes: one’s prediction of the likely consequences of that behaviour.
Differ from: Not the ability to execute execute basic motor skills.
NOr imply that we can perform without anxiety, fear, or stress.
It is merely our judgement (accurate or not) that we can execute the required actions.
Not global concept. Can have self efficacy in one area but not others. Varies from situation to situation.

Front 10

High and low Self-Efficacy combine with responsive/unresponsive environment to produce four predictive variables:

1) LE and RE

2) HE and UR

3) HE and RE

4) LE and UR

Back 10

1) be depressed. See others successful in task

2) Intensify efforts to change environment social activism.

3) people are successful

4) feel apathy, helplessness and resignation.

Front 11

Describe the following source of self-efficacy:

1) Mastering Experiences

Back 11

1) Most influential source.
Successful personal performance raises efficacy expectancies ; failures tend to lower them.

a) Success raises SE in proportion to the difficulty of the task.

b) Tasks successfully accomplished by self are more efficacious than those completed with the help of others.

c) Failure decrease E when we know that we put forth our best effort.

d) Failure under conditions of high emotional arousal or distress are not as self-debilitating as failure under maximal conditions.

e) Failure prior to establishing sense of mastery is more determinant to feelings of personal efficacy than later failure.

f) occasional failure has little effect of efficacy especially for people with high expectancy of success.

Front 12

Describe the following source of self-efficacy:

2) Social Modelling

Back 12

2) Aka vicarious experience provided by other people. SE raised when we observe the accomplishments of another person of equal competence. Dissimilar person will have little effect on SE.
Not as strong as personal performance.
Can last a lifetime.

Front 13

Describe the following source of self-efficacy:

3) Social Persuasion

Back 13

3) Limited effects of this source. But persuasion can raise or lower SE. Conditions needed for this to happen include: Person believe persuader. Exhortations and criticisms from credible source have more power.
Boosting self efficacy only occurs if activity person is trying to complete is with their own repertoire of behaviour. (Can’t run 100 m in 8 sec just because of verbal persuasion). Power of suggestion is related to the perceived status and authority of the persuader. More effective with successful performance. Persuasion may convince person to attempt activity. If both accomplishment and subsequent verbal rewards will increase future efficacy.

Front 14

Describe the following source of self-efficacy:

4) Physical and Emotional States

Back 14

4) Strong emotion lowers performance, when experience intense fear, acute anxiety, or high levels of stress. Moderate anxiety can increase performance. However reduction in anxiety can improve performance. Higher arousal the lower the SE. Nature of task plays factor. If emotional arousal may facilitate completion of simple tasks, but interfere with complex task.

Front 15

Describe the sources of self-efficacy:

Back 15

1) mastery experiences

2) social modeling

3) social persuasion

4) physical and emotional states

Front 16

Define and give examples of proxy agency:

Back 16

efine and give examples of proxy agency.

Indirect control over those social conditions that affect everyday living. People attempt to change their daily lives by contacting a professional who has the skills.
ex: hire young neighbour to mow lawn. retain lawyer to solve legal problem. rely on news station to learn about recent events.

Downside: Relying too much on the competence of others we weaken our sense of personal and collective efficacy.

Front 17

Define and give examples of collective efficacy.

Back 17

def “ people’s shared beliefs in their collective power to produce desired results” Confidence people have that their combined efforts will bring about group accomplishments.

2 techniques;
1) Combine individual members’ evaluations of their personal capabilities to enact behaviours that benefit the group.
ex. Actors in a play.
2) Measure confidence each person has in the group’s ability to bring about the desired outcome.
ex. baseball player may have little confidence in each of their teammates but possess high confidence that their team will perform quite well.

Personal efficacy of many working together. Not collective mind
Depends on not just skill and knowledge of each team member but the belief that they can work together in a coordinated fashion to achieve a goal.

HE but LCE - ex woman have HE that she can pursue a healthy lifestyle. LCE that she can reduce environemntal pollution.

Diff cultures have different CE.
US- High SE
China - High CE
Factors undermine collective efficacy:
-live in transformational world. What happens in one part of world can have direct impact on another part.
- Technology. Computerized controls in cars lowered SE of people with skills to fix their own car.
-Social Machinery - People who attempt to change bureaucratic structures are often discouraged by failure.

Front 18

Discuss Bandura's concept of self-regulation through moral agency.

Back 18

Internalized self-sanctions prevent people from violating their own moral standards either through selective activation or disengagement of internal control.

Selective activation refers to the notion that self-regulatory influences are not automatic but operate only if activated.

It also means that people react differently in different situations, depending on their evaluation of the situation.

Bandura applied his human agentic view via social cognitive theory for the personal and social aspects of control over moral values and conduct.

In particular, he states that in the social cognitive theory of the moral self, moral reasoning is linked to moral action through affective self-regulatory mechanisms by which moral agency is exercised.[24] However these self-regulatory mechanisms have to be activated psychosocially. Bandura found interest in the role that human agency plays when a society does not have safeguards set against particular lapses in moral judgment that an individual finds justification, morally or otherwise.

First, all people are capable of two morally agentic abilities, to act humanely and to not act inhumanely.

Selective moral disengagement occurs when a person actively disengages their self-regulating efficacy for moral conduct.[24]

Selective moral disengagement occurs via a “cognitive restructuring” of the inhumane acts into something justifiable.
He states the specific processes in which this occurs, they are as follows:

- moral justification
- sanitizing language
- exonerative social comparison
- disavowal of personal agency in the harm one causes by diffusion or displacement of responsibility
disregarding or minimizing the injurious effects of one’s actions, and attribution of blame to/dehumanization of those who are victimized

Front 19

Discuss ways in which people justify their own actions through disengagement of internal control.

1) Redefining behavior

2) Displacing or diffusing responsibility

3) dehumanizing victim

4) distort or obscure the relationship between behavior and its injurious consequences

Back 19

____ means that people are capable of separating themselves from the negative consequences of their behavior.

People in ambiguous moral situations—who are uncertain that their behavior is consistent with their own social and moral standards of conduct—may separate their conduct from its injurious consequences through four general techniques:

1) or justifying otherwise reprehensible actions by cognitively restructuring them.

People can use redefinition of behavior to disengage themselves from reprehensible conduct by:

- justifying otherwise culpable behavior on moral grounds;

- making advantageous comparisons between their behavior and the even more reprehensible behavior of others;
- using euphemistic labels to change the moral tone of their behavior.

2) people can disengage their behavior from its consequences by _______

3) involves________ the victims.

4) method is to _______ . People can do this by minimizing, disregarding, or distorting the consequences of their behavior.

Front 20

Describe Bandura's approach to understanding dysfunctional behavior.

Back 20

________ is learned through the mutual interaction of the person (including cognitive and neurophysiological processes), the environment (including interpersonal relations), and behavioral factors (especially previous experiences with reinforcement).

Front 21

efficacy expectations and outcome expectations

Back 21

How people behave in a particular situation depends in part on their self-efficacy, that is, their beliefs that they can or cannot exercise those behaviors necessary to bring about a desired consequence.

a) Efficacy expectations differ from outcome expectations, which refer to people's prediction of the likely consequences of their behavior.

Front 22

Bandura's concept of collective efficacy and give four examples.

Back 22

____ is the level of confidence that people have that their combined efforts will produce social change. At least four factors can lower ___

1) events in other parts of the world can leave people with a sense of helplessness

2) complex technology can decrease people's perceptions of control over their environment;

3) entrenched bureaucracies discourage people from attempting to bring about social change

4) the size and scope of worldwide problems contribute to people's sense of powerlessness.

Front 23

Name and explain four ways a person can justify reprehensible behavior.

Back 23

1) People can:

a) justifying on moral grounds

b) making advantageous comparisons between their behavior and the even more reprehensible behavior of others;

c) using euphemistic labels to change the moral tone of their behavior. "boys will be boys"

2) by displacing or diffusing responsibility.

3) dehumanizing or blaming the victims.

4) is to distort or obscure the relationship between behavior and its injurious consequences. People can do this by minimizing, disregarding, or distorting the consequences of their behavior