Chapter 12

1. Chapter 12 SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY: BANDURA AND MISCHEL

2. QUESTIONS TO BE ADDRESSED IN THIS CHAPTER • What is the role of cognitive processes in personality? • How do people learn complex social behaviors? • How can one scientifically analyze people’s capacity for agency, that is, their ability to influence their own actions and course of development? • In what ways do variations in behavior – as opposed to consistencies – reveal the nature of personality?

4. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY STRUCTURE • 4 structural concepts: • Competencies and skills • Expectancies and beliefs • Evaluative standards • Personal goals

5. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY COMPETENCIES AND SKILLS • Individual differences may reflect variation in the competencies needed to perform different types of actions (e.g., introverts may lack social skills) • Competencies involve ways of thinking about challenging situations and the skills needed to execute solutions

6. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY COMPETENCIES AND SKILLS • Competencies involve 2 types of knowledge: procedural and declarative: • Declarative knowledge = cognitive and behavioral capacities that can be expressed in words • Procedural knowledge = cognitive and behavioral capacities that a person may not be able to state in words

7. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY COMPETENCIES AND SKILLS • The focus on competencies has 2 implications: • Context specificity • A person may have excellent study skills, but they are of little use in getting a date • Psychological change • A person who lacks competence in a certain domain can acquire adaptive skills through social interaction (e.g., modeling)

8. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY BELIEFS, STANDARDS, AND GOALS • People think about the world in 3 ways: • People have beliefs about what the world really is like and what the world will be like (when beliefs involve the future, they are termed expectancies) • People have thoughts about what the world should be like - evaluative standards (i.e., mental criteria for judging goodness and worth) • People have thoughts about what they want to achieve in the future - goals

9. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES • A primary determinant of action and emotion is expectations about the future • People have expectancies about many things • The behavior of others • Rewards or punishments that may follow certain actions • Their ability to cope with situational challenges and stress • The capacity to have different expectations, and therefore different responses across situations, is adaptive

10. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES • The essence of personality lies in the diverse ways that people • Perceive specific situations • Develop expectancies about future events • As a result of having differing perceptions and expectancies, people exhibit distinctive behavior patterns • In this way, social-cognitive theorists can explain why two people react differently to the same environment

11. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES Self-Efficacy • Perceived self-efficacy = expectations of one’s capability to initiate and sustain specific action in a future situation • People with a high self-efficacy are likely to • Attempt difficult tasks • Persist in their efforts • Remain calm (vs. anxious) during task performance • Organize task-related thoughts logically

12. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES Self-Efficacy • People with low self-efficacy • Do not attempt desired activities • Give up when they encounter difficulty • Become anxious during task performance • Become “rattled” by failing to think analytically about the task

13. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES Self-Efficacy • Perceived self-efficacy differs from self-esteem in 2 ways: • Perceived self-efficacy is not a global construct; people have different self-efficacy beliefs in different situations • Perceived self-efficacy is not an abstract sense of personal worth, but a judgment of what one can do • The correlation between self-esteem and performance is weak, whereas the correlation between perceived self-efficacy and performance is strong

14. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES Self-Efficacy • The difference between perceived self-efficacy and outcome expectations • Perceived self-efficacy = expectations about one’s capability to initiate and sustain specific action in a future situation • Outcome expectations = beliefs about the consequences (i.e., rewards and punishments) that follow specific action in a future situation • In general, perceived self-efficacy is more important than outcome expectations in determining situational behavior

15. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY BELIEFS AND EXPECTANCIES Self-Efficacy • Microanalytic research strategy • Situation-specific measures capture variability in perceived self-efficacy • People rate their degree of certainty in performing specific behaviors in specific situations • “Do you think you are a good basketball player?” versus “How confident are you that you can make at least 75% of your free throws?”

16. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY GOALS • Goal = a mental representation of the aim of an action or sequence of actions • The ability to envision the future enables people to set goals and, thus, motivate and direct their own behavior • Goals • Establish priorities from among alternative futures • Contribute to self-regulation • Organize behavior over time • May differ in subjective meaning (e.g., learning vs. performance goals)

17. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY GOALS • Goal systems • Hierarchically organized • Flexible • People’s goals for a task may differ in many ways • Level of challenge (e.g., passing a course vs. getting an A) • Proximity (e.g., losing 1 pound each week vs. 12 pounds in the next three months) • Proximal goals have more influence on current behavior than do distal goals, which allow one to slack off in the present

18. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY EVALUATIVE STANDARDS • Criteria for judging the quality of behavior and that influence emotions and future action; fundamental to motivation and level of performance • Personal standards = internalized evaluative standards commonly used to evaluate the quality one’s own behavior • Evaluative standards often trigger emotional reactions or self-evaluative reactions (e.g., pride vs. dissatisfaction)

19. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY EVALUATIVE STANDARDS • Moral behavior • Although members of society are familiar with its moral principles, people do not always use them to guide their own actions • Sometimes people disengage from their moral evaluative standards when they perceive an advantage in doing so • Disengaging from moral evaluative standards allows people to act in ways they normally would not

20. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY EVALUATIVE STANDARDS • Osofsky et al. (2005) - how can people who generally believe that killing is wrong execute prisoners? • Studied staff at maximum-security prisons who differed in their level of involvement in executions • Staff completed a measure of the tendency to disengage from moral evaluative standards • The degree to which staff displayed moral disengagement varied according to their level of involvement in executions • Staff who were directly involved in executions showed higher levels of moral disengagement

21. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Reciprocal Determinism • Behavior, personality, and the environment constitute a system of forces that mutually influence one another over time • Discourse about “inner versus outer” or “internal versus external” forces fails to recognize how the person and environment influence each another (P x E)

23. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS) • The functioning of any system reflects not only its parts, but also how its parts are interconnected • Systems with many integrated parts exhibit complex and coherent functioning, even if the parts themselves are relatively simple • Personality is such a system • Social-cognitive constructs are relatively simple • Social cognitive constructs interact in a complex, yet organized fashion and bring coherence to personality functioning

24. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS) • Mischel & Shoda (1995) • Different elements of situations activate different subsets of the personality system • If this proposition is true, then people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior should vary from situation to situation

25. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS) • Shoda et al.(1994) • Children at summer camp were observed in various settings (e.g., cabin meeting, playground) • Each situation was defined in terms of whether children’s interactions • Involved a peer or an adult counselor • Was positive or negative • For each child, the frequency of five types of behavior were recorded - verbal aggression, physical aggression, whiny behavior, compliance, and prosocial talk • Recordings were made each hour, 5 hours per day, 6 days per week, for 6 weeks

26. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS) • Shoda et al.(1994) • Behavior differed in different situations • Individual differences were found in the expression of each of the five behaviors • Each child had a distinctive, stable profile of behavior expressed in specific situations • Averaging behavior across situations would have masked distinctive patterns of situation-behavior relationships

28. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS) • Behavioral signatures = distinctive profiles of situation-behavior relationships • “It is this type of intraindividual stability in the pattern and organization of behavior that seems especially central for a psychology of personality ultimately devoted to understanding and capturing the uniqueness of individual functioning” (Shoda et al., 1994, p. 683).

29. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Observational Learning (Modeling) • Sometimes learning cannot occur by inefficient trial-and-error because errors are costly • People can learn by observing the behavior of others and the consequences to them • Observational learning (modeling) = people form mental representations of situational behavior and consequences that they have seen which they use in the future to guide their own adaptive responses • More complex than imitation

30. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Observational Learning (Modeling) • Acquisitionversus Performance • Bandura et al. (1963) • Three groups of children observed a model displaying aggression toward a Bobo doll • Reward, Punishment, No Consequences • After observing the model’s aggressive behavior, children were presented with two conditions • Positive Incentive, No Incentive

31. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Observational Learning (Modeling) • Bandura et al. (1963) • Did consequences to the model affect children’s aggressive behavior? • Children who observed the Model Punished performed fewer imitative acts than children in the Model Rewarded or No Consequences groups • This difference disappeared when children were offered incentives to reproduce the model’s behavior (Positive Incentive) • Consequences to the model affected children’s performance of aggressive acts, but not their acquisitionor learning of how to behave aggressively

33. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Observational Learning (Modeling) • Vicarious conditioning = the process of learning emotional reactions by observing others • Intense, persistent fear of snakes developed in young monkeys that observed their parents behaving fearfully in the presence of real or toy snakes • Participants who observed a model exhibiting fear toward an object developed a conditioned emotional response to that previously neutral stimulus

34. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Delay of Gratification • Bandura & Mischel (1965) • Children high or low in delay of gratification were exposed to models of the opposite behavior • High-delay children observed a model who selected a small immediate reward and commented on its benefits; low-delay children observed a model who selected a larger deferred reward and commented on the virtues of delay • Live-model condition - children observed a model who chose between a small immediate reward versus a larger reward later • Symbolic-model condition - children read verbal accounts of high versus low delay choices • No-model condition – children were told about the high versus low delay choices given to adults

35. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Delay of Gratification • Bandura & Mishcel (1965) • Following exposure, children were given a choice between an immediate small reward or a large delayed reward • High-delay children across conditions altered their choices in favor of immediate gratification • The live-model condition produced the greatest effect • Low-delay children across conditions altered their choices in favor of deferred gratification • No differences were found between types of modeling • For all children, the effects of modeling were maintained for at least one month

37. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Delay of Gratification • Availability for attention has an effect on children’s capacity to delay • When rewards are concealed, most children can wait • When rewards are visible, most children have difficulty controlling their impulses • In addition to physical availability, a key element in delay of gratification is what children think of as they try to wait for the larger reward

38. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Delay of Gratification • Children tend to delay when they use strategies that mentally distance them from the attractive features of a reward • Think about how marshmallows resemble non-food objects (e.g., clouds) • Sing songs to themselves or play distracting mental games • Cool encoding = thinking about a stimulus in ways that do not activate hot impulsive emotions

39. SOCIAL-COGNITIVE THEORY PROCESS Delay of Gratification • Implications for personality development • Shoda et al. (1990) • Correlation between preschool measures of delay in a laboratory setting and measures of cognitive and social competencies attained in adolescence