Behaviorism Social Learning

1. BehaviorismSocial Learning

2. Behaviorism

3. What is Behaviorism? • A theoretical perspective that attempt to understand behavior by focusing on: • the external contingencies of reinforcement (any consequence of an action that increases the probability of that action being executed again) • punishment (any consequence of an action that decreases the probability of its repetition)

4. What is Behaviorism? • As one of the dominant psychological approaches of the mid-twentieth century, behaviorism was used to interpret and explain behavior of all kinds, including the idiosyncratic behaviors of humans that in other contexts would be seen as external signs of internal "personalities."

5. Behaviorism • Field of psychology that flourished in the middle part of the 20th century in US. • Behaviorism attempted to explain all behavior through effect of the environmental contingencies of reward and punishment. • Early researcher - John Watson  argued that the only way to conduct scientific psychology was by focusing on observable behavior, not by making introspective self-reports. • Watson also emphasized the importance of environment in shaping behavior  He argued that animals, including humans, will work toward things that aid their survival & reproduction (e.g. food, water, sex), & avoid things that harm them. • B. F. Skinner - extended Watson and other behaviorists' work into domains such as education and personality.

6. The Basics of Behaviorism • Initially, the basic behaviorist experiment works as follows: • a rat/human is given several response options, each of which is associated with a reward/punishment. • a rat is given the option of pressing 1of 2 levers Pressing one of the levers results in the delivery of sugar water or a food pellet; pressing the other lever has no result  The number of times a rat presses each lever is recorded. • Over time, the number of lever- presses on the lever associated with the reward increases. • Any result that causes an increase in lever pressing is called a reinforce, and the process by which the lever presses increases is called reinforcement. • If the lever is associated with a punisher (e.g. an electric shock or a startling noise), the number of lever- presses decreases over time; this is called punishment. • .

7. The Basics of Behaviorism (con’t) • According to B. F. Skinner, this process is known as the "operant conditioning“ • Earlier behaviorist,i.e. Edward Lee Thorndike, had called it the "law of effect." • Thus, the rate at which a rat (or a human) learns to start pressing one lever instead of another can be affected by different schedules of reinforcement or punishment.

8. Applying Behaviorism to Personality • How can these rules of behavior, derived from the experiments with rats, be applied to understanding human personality? • Behaviorists argued that the behavior could be completely predicted if one knew the organism's (person’s) history of stimuli, actions, and their corresponding rewards and punishments. • Behaviorists were radically opposed to the humanistic approach, which emphasized the importance of self-determination and subjective experience, and to the psychodynamic approach, which emphasized deterministic and unconscious--but nonetheless internal--mechanisms of behavior.

9. Applying Behaviorism to Personality (con’t) • Skinner argued that most of human behavior is driven by secondary reinforcers, such as money & social praise, which derive their value from primary reinforcers. For e.g: • We work for money because we know that it will result in food and other direct comforts. • Over the course of a lifetime, we accumulate many associations between stimuli we encounter our behavioral responses to them  and the reinforcement or punishment that results. • Everyone history of exposure to environmental contingencies varies  so each person's behavior will also differ  For e.g: • A person who had a frightening experience with a spider as a child will avoid spiders in the future  may develop a phobia that can strongly influence their behavior. • A person who had never had such an experience would behave very differently if exposed to a spider.

10. Does Behaviorism explain personality? • Behaviorism was not, however, very successful in helping researchers understand personality, despite its dominance over academic psychology. • As part of the "cognitive revolution" in the late 1950's and 1960's  some researchers began to expand behaviorism to include internal representations of reinforcement and punishment ("expectations" and "motivation") and the social influences on behavior. • One of these researchers was Albert Bandura  whose work on self- representations and self-efficacy, has had a strong influence on current understandings of personality.

11. Does Behaviorism explain personality? (con’t) • Bandura argued that behaviorism failed to capture some of the most important aspects of human behavior - especially the social cognitive approach focused on the role of expectations, goals, and idiosyncratic interpretations in shaping the effect of rewards and punishments on behavior. • Bandura also argued that people learned how to behave not only from their personal experience with reinforcement and punishment,  but also from talking to other people and from watching the consequences of others' behaviors.

12. Social Learning(Social Cognition)Albert Bandura.

13. Social Cognitive Theory  - • Approach to personality that focused on the role of modeling on behavior as well as the role of social influences, expectations, and interpretations on behavior. • It is an offshoot of, and related to behaviorism, but it differs with behaviorism in that it conceives different people as reacting differently (subjectively) to the exact same rewards or punishments

14. Basic Assumptions of Social Cognitive Approach • The social cognitive approach to personality focuses on the several ways in which concrete behaviors can be changed. • Through the process of social modeling - a person watches another person give a particular response in a situation and learns about the consequences of that response  the observer identifies with the modeler and will decide to give the same response if he finds himself in a similar situation in the future (if the consequence was positive) or will avoid that response (if the consequence was negative). • Observe  learn  model

15. Basic Assumptions of Social Cognitive Approach (con’t) • Social cognitive theory also assume that each person's idiosyncratic way of interpreting the world, and his/her particular goals & expectations, will modulate the way a particular reinforcer/ punisher will affect his/her behavior. • For example, a person who feels that making money is not an important goal will not work for it, despite the fact that it is associated with many primary reinforcers. • A single person will differ from situation to situation depending on the extent to which any given reinforcer or punisher is important to him or her. • Thus, the effects of rewards and punishments are both situation-and person-specific.

16. Bandura’s Self-Efficacy – in personality development • Self-efficacy refers to one's belief in one's ability to succeed at a particular task. • According to Bandura  simply asking someone how confident they are that they can succeed at a particular task helps enormously in predicting how well the person will perform at that task - even if the person has never done the task in the past and has no basis on which to be confident. • Bandura showed that altering a person's self- efficacy can sometimes be the best way to improve his or her performance. • For example snake phobics who had difficulty even remaining in the same room with a snake were able to pick up and hold the snake after a two-hour session of exposure therapy.

17. Bandura’s Self-Efficacy (con’t) • Can a person’s self-efficacy be changed? • Yes! Through:- • personal experience, • social modeling, and • changes in the person's goals and expectations.