Social learning theory
Encyclopedia
Theory
Social learning theory is derived from the work of Albert Bandura which proposed that social learning occurred through four main stages of imitation:- close contact
- imitation of superiors
- understanding of concepts
- role model behavior
Julian Rotter
Julian Rotter
Julian Rotter is an American psychologist who is known for developing influential theories, including social learning theory and locus of control.-Background:...
moved away from theories based on psychosis
Psychosis
Psychosis means abnormal condition of the mind, and is a generic psychiatric term for a mental state often described as involving a "loss of contact with reality"...
and behaviorism
Behaviorism
Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
, 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.
Albert Bandura
Albert Bandura
Albert Bandura is a psychologist and the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University...
expanded on Rotter's idea, as well as earlier work by Miller & Dollard, 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
Attention
Attention is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology and cognitive neuroscience....
: retention
Spaced repetition
Spaced repetition is a learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material; this exploits the psychological spacing effect...
(remembering what one observed), reproduction (ability to reproduce the behavior), and motivation
Motivation
Motivation is the driving force by which humans achieve their goals. Motivation is said to be intrinsic or extrinsic. The term is generally used for humans but it can also be used to describe the causes for animal behavior as well. This article refers to human motivation...
(good reason) to want to adopt the behavior.
Development
Development in Social Learning Theory- Humans learn from their environment Social learning theory believes growth and development occur through a process called experiential learning.
- This indicates that there is no universal developmental milestone according to social learning theory
- Social learning theorists are more interested in process rather than content
- Unlike other theorists, Bandura believed in both logical and illogical thought processes. Bandura stated that children have the capability to use both of these processes but this is dependent on which types of processes they have learned from their environment.
- Mechanisms of Development
- Similar to Vygotsky’s theory of development, social learning theorists focus on the process of change and not the structural process (or stages that other theorists such as Freud and Erickson promoted)
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:
- Positive reinforcement: A stimulus is added to increase a behavior - A child is clapped for when they dance.
- Negative reinforcement: A stimulus is decreased or removed to increase a behavior - A prisoner receives a reprieve from his jail sentence for good behavior.
- Positive punishment: A stimulus is added to decrease a behavior - A child is placed in time out for inappropriate behavior.
- Negative punishment: A stimulus is decreased or removed to decrease a behavior - A child's cell phone is taken away for poor behavior at school
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
- Child’s attention
- Memory
- Cognitive organization
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.
What drives Development?
Social learning theorists take a contextual world-view on developmentSocial 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.
Criminology
In criminologyCriminology
Criminology is the scientific study of the nature, extent, causes, and control of criminal behavior in both the individual and in society...
, Ronald Akers and Robert Burgess (1966) 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).
The first two stages were used by Edwin Sutherland
Edwin Sutherland
Edwin H. Sutherland was an American sociologist. He is considered as one of the most influential criminologists of the twentieth century...
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
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
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 (Pfohl, 1994).
Functionalism had been the dominant paradigm but, in the 1960s, there was a shift towards Social Control Theories
Social control theory
In criminology, Social Control Theory Travis Hirschi fits into the Positivist School, Neo-Classical School, and, later, Right Realism. It proposes that exploiting the process of socialization and social learning builds self-control and reduces the inclination to indulge in behavior recognized as...
, conflict criminology
Conflict criminology
Largely based on the writings of Karl Marx, conflict criminology claims that crime is inevitable in capitalist societies, as invariably certain groups will become marginalised and unequal. In seeking equality, members of these groups may often turn to crime in order to gain the material wealth...
, and labeling theories
Labeling theory
Labeling theory is closely related to interactionist and social construction theories. Labeling theory was developed by sociologists during the 1960's. Howard Saul Becker's book entitled Outsiders was extremely influential in the development of this theory and its rise to popularity...
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
Punishment
Punishment is the authoritative imposition of something negative or unpleasant on a person or animal in response to behavior deemed wrong by an individual or group....
to deter crime. Unlike labeling theory, social learning theory actually supports the use of punishment which translates into longer sentences
Sentence (law)
In law, a sentence forms the final explicit act of a judge-ruled process, and also the symbolic principal act connected to his function. The sentence can generally involve a decree of imprisonment, a fine and/or other punishments against a defendant convicted of a crime...
for those convicted, and helps to explain the increase in the prison
Prison
A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...
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.
Serial murder and social learning theory
Hale 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. 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. 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.Applications
The applications of social learning theory have been important in the history of education policies in the United States. The zone of proximal developmentZone of proximal development
“The zone of proximal development defines functions that have not matured yet, but are in a process of maturing. The zone of proximal development , often abbreviated ZPD, is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help...
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
Locus of control
Locus of control is a theory in personality psychology referring to the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them. Understanding of the concept was developed by Julian B...
is an important consideration when helping students in higher education environments perform better academically. Cassandra B. Whyte
Cassandra B. Whyte
Cassandra Bolyard Whyte is an American higher education administrator, teacher, and educational researcher. She is recognized for publication and leadership in the areas of higher education management, improving academic performance of students, campus planning and safety, predicting educational...
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.
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
Instructional scaffolding
Instructional scaffolding is the provision of sufficient support to promote learning when concepts and skills are being first introduced to students...
is another technique that is used widely across the United States. Most academic subjects take advantage of scaffolding, however mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
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
Addition
Addition is a mathematical operation that represents combining collections of objects together into a larger collection. It is signified by the plus sign . For example, in the picture on the right, there are 3 + 2 apples—meaning three apples and two other apples—which is the same as five apples....
and subtraction
Subtraction
In arithmetic, subtraction is one of the four basic binary operations; it is the inverse of addition, meaning that if we start with any number and add any number and then subtract the same number we added, we return to the number we started with...
will not be able to understand algebra
Algebra
Algebra is the branch of mathematics concerning the study of the rules of operations and relations, and the constructions and concepts arising from them, including terms, polynomials, equations and algebraic structures...
. The process of learning math is a scaffolding technique because the knowledge builds on itself over time.