Social Learning Theory
Modelling and self-efficacy. The bridge between behaviourism and cognition.
Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling.
Social Learning Theory sets out Bandura's account of how people acquire behaviour by watching others, not only by acting and being reinforced. Prentice-Hall published it in 1977, drawing together a decade of experimental work into a single framework. The book argues that learning is largely observational: a person forms an internal representation of what a model does, then draws on it to guide later action. Cognition sits at the centre. Attention, retention, rehearsal and expectation shape what is taken up and what is left aside.
Bandura also develops self-efficacy, the belief in one's capacity to carry out a course of action, and reciprocal determinism, in which behaviour, the person and the environment each act on the others. For a clinician, the value lies in a vocabulary for how patients absorb the conduct of parents, partners and the therapist, and for why a sense of agency shifts what a person will attempt.
About the author
Albert Bandura
Albert Bandura (1925 to 2021) was a Canadian American psychologist who spent most of his career at Stanford University. Working within social and cognitive traditions rather than psychoanalysis, he showed that people learn behaviour by observing and imitating others, a process demonstrated in the Bobo doll studies of aggression. His Social Learning Theory, along with the concepts of self-efficacy and reciprocal determinism, reframed how agency, modelling, and a patient's belief in their own capacity shape change.
Details
- 1977
- English
- Prentice Hall
- Prentice Hall, 1977
- 247
- 9780138167516