Social-Cognitive Approach

• Personality is acquired through learning and then is displayed in particular situations

• Emphasis placed on:• how thoughts and expectations guide our

interactions• social situations

Big Names

• Bandura• Bobo Doll and Vicarious Social Learning

• Mischel• Agency

How Different From Skinner?

• Cognitive Focus: Emphasis on memory of past reinforcements and expectations about the consequences of actions.

• Social-Interpersonal Focus—How particular situations guide action, and the most important situational variable is other people.

• Humans as Agents of Change--Choice from a number of possible behaviors. The environment does not only influence the person--the person also influences the environment.

Rotter’s Expectancy Theory

• Learning creates cognitive expectancies

• Behavior determined by:• what the person expects to happen following

a behavior• value on the outcome.

• generalized expectancies (apply across different situations)

Rotter’s Locus of Control

Personal efforts and actions

Fate, luck, or circumstances

Internal External

http://www.psych.uncc.edu/pagoolka/LocusofControl-intro.html

Outcome

Positive Negative

“I did it” “Unlucky Break”

Optimistic Bias

Outcome

Positive Negative

Me

Other

Person

“I did it”

“She got lucky” “She screwed up”

“Unlucky Break”

Self-Serving Bias

Bandura and Agency

• Viewed people as agents, or originators, of experience

• Human agency is the ability to act and make things happen

• Agency entails• Intentionality• Forethought• Self-reflective

Self-Efficacy

• A central mechanism of personal agency and self-regulation

• Refers to belief that we can successfully perform behaviors that will produce desired effects

• Plays a central role in governing our thoughts, motivations, and actions

• Arises from past accomplishments and changes over the course of our lives

Self-Efficacy

• Learned Chance of Success

“I think I can”

Vicarious Learning Gone Wrong

• Frequent exposure to aggression and violence in the media encourages people to behave aggressively

• Moral disengagement permits individuals and institutions to perpetuate and encourage violence and inhuman activities while justifying their behavior

• Bo-Bo Doll Experiments

Psychotherapy

• Modeling as an aid of changing behaviors

• Therapeutic strategies designed to help patients improve their perception over their own effectiveness through guided mastery experiences

• Encourages the use of contemporary technologies to modify behavior

ReciprocalDeterminism

Walter Mischel

• personal dispositions are situation specific

• personal dispositions encourage behaviors that alter situations that, in turn, promote other behaviors

• people choose situations that are in tune with their personal dispositions

• personal dispositions are more important in some situations but not others

Social-Cognitive Approach

• Positives:• based on solid foundation (learning/cognition)• treatment procedures

• Negatives:• no role for unconscious thoughts and feelings• doesn’t capture the complexities, richness,

and uniqueness of human personality• sometimes “I think I can is not enough”

The Humanist Approach

• motivated by an innate drive toward growth

• people are naturally good, creative, loving, and joyful

• to explain actions, we must understand a person’s “perceptions of themselves”• “phenomenological approach.”

Rogers’s Self-Theory

• we need the positive regard of others (unconditional positive regard)

• our behavior is directed at self-actualizing

• others’ evaluations affect personality if they question person’s worth (conditions of worth)• “Johnny is a bad boy” vs. “Hitting is not nice”

Rogers’s Self Theory

Carl Rogers

• Client-centered therapy• focus on thoughts,

abilities, cleverness of client

• not focused on insights of therapist

• therapist as a sounding board for client’s thoughts

Evaluation of theHumanistic Approach

• Positives• therapeutic alliance

• Negatives• too naïve, romantic, and unrealistic• too simple

• do all problems stem from blocked self-actualization?

• too vague • too western