Learning and Social Learning Theories

[Ready for Fall 2026]

Modified: 2026-08-03 9:17 PM CDST

• 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 in social learning theories 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.