Describe The Social Learning Theory.

Many psychologists have found Skinner’s basic emphasis on behavior and reinforcement welcome but have found the exclusive focus on behavior too extreme. Among these people are the social learning theorists who have added to their behavior account of personality many cognitive factors (Bandura, 1977). Many variables such as a person’s expectancies and values are important in the social learning perspective on personality.

Perhaps the most important departure of the social learning theories from strict behaviorism has been to argue that people can learn by means other than direct reinforcement.

To account for this, they have devised the important notion of observational learning. This idea holds that people often learn not only by having their behaviors reinforced but also by observing other people perform behaviors and receive reinforcement. These other people are called models. For example, from observing models we can learn how to play a tennis ball, insult strangers and welcome visitors. Sometimes we can learn how to perform a behavior by simply watching another person perform it once. In other instances, we must observe many times and practice the behavior on our own extensively, as may be the case in learning how to nurture other or be assertive.

Observation learning is one way we might learn behaviors without reinforcement, but reinforcement remains very important in determining whether a person will actually perform a behavior. A person may have learned how to influence a group but may not engage in this behavior until some kind of reinforcement is available. This is often enough to induce the person to begin performing the behavior. However, the person will also perform the behavior because of vicarious reinforcement (Bandura, Ross & Ross, 1963). Vicarious reinforcement takes place when we observe another person being reinforced for an action. It often leads us to expect that we too will be reinforced for performing the same action; for example, if we see that one of our neighbors earns money for keeping his compound clean, we may engage in these behaviors too, assuming of course that through observation we have learned how to perform them.
In introducing concepts such as observational learning and vicarious reinforcement, social learning theorists have demonstrated that cognitive processes are important in a full account of learning. For example, we have to consider attention, memory and expectancy to understand how people learn and to predict how they will act.

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Kavungya answered the question on May 8, 2019 at 08:42