BANDURA’s Social Cognitive
Theory
Overwiew of social cognitive theory;
Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory takes chance encounters and
forutuitous events seriously, even while recognizing that these mettings and
events do not invariably alter one’s life path.
Social cognitive theory rests on several basic assumptions. First, the
outstanding characteristic of humans is plasticity; that is, humans have the
flexibility to learn a variety of behaviors in diverse situations. Bandura
agrees with Skinner that people can and
do learn through direct experience, but he places much more emphasis on
vicarious learning, that is, learning by observing others.
Second, through a tradic reciprocal causation model that includes behavioral,
environment, and personal factors, people have the capacity to regulate their
lives. Humans can transform transitory events into relatively consistent ways
of evaluating and regulating their social and cultural environments. Without
this capacity, people would merely react to sensory experiences and would lack
the capacity to anticipate events, create new ideas, or use internal standarts
to evaluate present experiences.
Third, social cognitive theory takes an agentic perspective, meaning
that humans have the capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality
of their lives. People are the producers as well as the products of social
system. An important component of the triadic reciprocal causation model is
self-efficacy. People’s performance is generally enhanced when they have high
self-efficacy: that is, the confidence that they can perform those behaviors
that will produce desired behaviors in a particular situation.
Fourth, people regulate their conduct through both external and internal
factors. External factors include people’s physical and social environments,
whereas internal factors include self-observation, judgemental process, and
self-reaction.
Fifth, when people find themselves in morally ambigious situations, they
typically attempt to regulate their behavior through moral agency, which
includes redefining the behavior, disregarding or distorting the consequences
of their behavior, dehumanizing or blaming the victims of their behavior, and
displacing or diffusing responsibility for their actions.
LEARNING
One
of the earliest and most basic assumptions of Bandura’s social cognitive theory
is that humans are quite flexible and capable of learning a multitude of
attitudes, skills, and behaviors and that a good bit of those learnings are a
result of vicarious experiences.
Observational learning; observation allows people without performing any
behavior. People ebserve natural phenomena, plants, waterfalls, the motion of
the moon and stars, and so forth; but especially important to social cognitive
theory is the assumption that they learn tthrough observing the behavior of other people.
· Modelling, the core
of observational learning. Learning through modelling involves adding and
subtracting from the observed behavior and generalizing from one observation to
another. In other words, modelling involves cognitive processes and is not
simply mimircy or imitation. It is more than matching the actions of an other;
it involves symbolically representing information and storing it for use at a
future time (Bandura, 1986, 1994).
ENACTIVE LEARNING
Every response a person makes is followed by some consequences. Some of
these consequneces are satisfying, some are dissatisfying, and others are
simply not cognitively attended and hence have little effect.
The consequences of a response serve at
least three functions. First, response consequences inform us of the effects of
our actions. We can retain this information the two would be conditioning each
other’s behavior in the Skinnerian sense. The behavior of the father would be
controlled by the environment; but his behavior, in turn, would have a
countercontrolling effects on his environment, namely the child. In Bandura’s
theory, however, the father is capable of thinking about the consequences of
rewarding or ignoring the child’s behavior.
·
Self-Efficacy, how people act in a particular situation
depends on the reciprocity of behavioral, environmental, and cognitive
conditions, especially those cognitive factors that relate to their beliefs
that can or cannot execute the behavior necessary to produce desired outcomes
in any particular situation (Bandura 1997) calls these expectations
self-efficacy. Bandura(2001) defined self-efficacy as ‘people’s beliefs in
their capabilityto exercise some measure of control over their own functioning
and over environmental events. Bandura contends that ‘efficacy beliefs are the
foundation of human agency’. People who believe that they can do something that
has the potential to alter environmental events are more likely to act and more
likely to be successful than those people with low self-efficacy. High and low
efficacy combine with responsive and unresponsive environmental to produce four
possible predictive variables (Bnadura 1997). When efficacy is high and environment
is responsive, outcomes are most likely to be successful. When low efficacy is
combined with a responsive environment, people may become depressed when they
observe that others are successful at tasks that seem to difficult fort hem.
What contributes to self-efficacy; Personal efficacy is acquired,
enhanced, or decreased through any one or combination of four sources: 1-
mastery experiences, 2- social modelling, 3- social persuasion,
·
Mastery experiences: The most influential sources of
self-efficacy are mastery experiences, general, successful performance raises
efficacy expectancies; failure tends to lower them.
·
Social modelling: Is vicarious experiences provided by other
people. Our self-efficacy is raised when we observe the accomplishments of
another person of equal competence, but is lowered when we see a peer fail.
When the other person is dissimilar o us, social modelling will have little
effect on our self-efficacy.
·
Social persuation: Self efficacy can also be acquired or
weakened through social persuasion (Bandura 1997). The effects of this source
are limited, but under properconditions, persuasion from others can raise or
lower self-efficacy. The first condition is that a person must believe the
persuader. Exhortations or criticisms from a credible source have more
eficacious power than do those from a noncredible person.
·
Physical and Emotional States: The final source of efficacy
is people’s physiological and emotional states (Bandura 1997). Strong emotion
ordinarily lowers performance; when peole experience intense fear, acute
anxiety, or high levels of stress, they are likely to have lower efficacy
expectancies. An actor in a school play knows his lines during rehearsal but
realizes that the fear he feels on openning night may block his recall.
Self Regulation; When people have high levels of self-efficacy, are
confident in their reliance on proxies, and process solid collective efficacy,
they will have considerable capacity to regulate their own behavior. Bandura
(1994) believes that people use both reactive and proactive strategies for
self-regulation. That is, they reactively attempt to reduce the discrepancies,
they proactively set newer and higher goals for themselves.
Critique of Bandura;
Albert Bandura has evolved his social cognitive theory by a careful
balance of the two principal components of theory building-innovative
speculation and accurate observation. His theoretical speculations have seldom
outdistanced his data but have been carefully advanced; only one step in front
of observations. This scientifically sound procedure increases the likelihood
that this hypotheses will yield positive results and that his theory will
generate additional testable hypotheses.
The
usefulness of Bandura’s personality theory, like that of other theories, rests
on its ability to generate research, to offer itself to falsification, and to
organize knowledge.
Bandura’s theory has generated several thousands research studies and
thus receives a very high rating on its capacity to generate research. Bandura
and his student colleagues have conducted much of the work, but other
researches, too, have been attracted to the theory.
On
the standard of falsifiability, we rate Bandura’s theory high. Self-efficacy
theory suggest that ‘people’s beliefs in their personal efficacy influence what
courses of action they choose to persue, how much effort they will invest in
activities, how long they will persevere in the face of obstacles and failure
experiences, and their resiliency following setbacks’. (Bandura, 1994).
The
final ciriterion of a useful theory is parsimony. Again, Bandura’s theory meets
high standards, theory is simple, straightforward, and unencumbered by
hypothetical or fanciful explanations.
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder