The Social Cognitive Approach to Personality

The Social Cognitive Approach to Personality
The social cognitive approach to personality grew out of a recognition that behaviorism failed to capture some of the most important aspects of human behavior. In particular, the social cognitive approach focused on the role of expectations, goals, and idiosyncratic interpretations in shaping the effect of rewards and punishments on behavior. Further, it 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. One of the most influential social cognitive theorists was (and is) Albert Bandura. In this section, we first summarize the assumptions of the social cognitive approach to personality (also known as social learning theory). We then briefly discuss one of the core concepts of Bandura's approach to human behavior: self-efficacy.

Basic Assumptions of Social Cognitive Approach

The social cognitive approach to personality focuses on the multiple ways in which concrete behaviors can be changed. One of these ways is the sole focus of behaviorism: individual experiences shaped by reward and punishment. However, social modeling also has an important effect on human behavior. In social modeling, one person watches another person give a particular response in a situation and learns about the consequences of that response. To the extent that the observer identifies with the modeler, he 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). Another important assumption of social cognitive theory is that each person's idiosyncratic way of interpreting the world, and his or her particular goals and expectations, will modulate the way that a particular reinforcer or punisher will affect his or her behavior. For instance, a person for whom making money is not an important goal will not work for it, despite the fact that it is associated with many primary reinforcers. Additionally, 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.

Self-Efficacy

Self-efficacy refers to one's belief in one's ability to succeed at a particular task. Albert Bandura's research has shown that 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 instance, 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. The best predictor of the success of the therapy was the extent to which it improved the snake phobic's sense of self-efficacy. How can self-efficacy be changed? By all of the means mentioned above: personal experience, social modeling, and changes in the person's goals and expectations.