Learning and Social Learning Theories

Modified: 2020-04-21

Another set of developmental personality theories developed from the American tradition of laboratory experimentation. As Freudian concepts became well known, Dollard and Miller attempted to translate those concepts into the language of learning theory. They analyzed, for example, the role of verbal cues in psychoanalytic sessions and found that patients were often subtly shaped into discussing psychoanalytic concepts by their therapists. By and large, however, such attempts to convert psychoanalytic concepts to testable constructs for learning theory were failures. But those efforts did lead the way for independent theories of personality based on the principles discovered in the learning laboratories.

Perhaps the most influential of those theories was Bandura and Walters's social learning theory. They demonstrated that most human learning is observational, and that reinforcers serve more to determine the overt expression of learning, than the learning itself. Their most famous study (the Bobo Doll study), for example, studied how children would respond after being left alone. Prior to the adults in the study leaving, they modeled a set of behaviors. In one such set, the adult played with the children constructively and quietly; in another, the adult was boisterous and loud. Children, when left alone, modeled the adult closely, meaning that the adult's behavior predicted the children's behavior well. Learning and social-learning theories have produced a view of personality as a construct that is mostly under the control of social- developmental factors. These theories have had an important effect on government policy, most notably, the establishment of the Head Start program. Later, we will examine some personality theories that give more power to genetic factors than do learning and social learning theories. A key concept was reciprocal determinism, the interaction of behavior, cognition, and the environment.

Two other ideas that fall under the umbrella of learned factors in personality are locus of control and the consistency controversy. Rotter's locus of control describes how people feel about causation. One is said to have an internal locus of control if one believes that rewards come from within. One is said to have an external locus of control if one believes that rewards come from without. For example, if people require some external payoff for completing tasks, they are under an external locus of control. Locus of control is assumed to be mostly learned.

Similarly, the consistency controversy asks just how consistent is personality? It turns out that the answer depends on how that question is asked. Individuals may view themselves as consistent, but others, seeing them in a variety of situations, may not. From a learning perspective, inconsistency in behavior reflects the effects on learning and experience in those various environments. For example, a boy may be extremely confident and at ease when in the company of other boys, but may become shy and ill at ease in mixed company. One might assume that he had much experience with boys but little with girls.

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