Chapter 18: Rotter and Mischel: Cognitive Social Learning Theory – Flashcards

Both Julian Rotter and Walter Mischel believe that cognitive factors. They reject Skinners belief that behviour is determined as being shaped by immediate reinforcements. Both theorists suggest that our *expectations* of future events are major determinants of performance. Rotter contends that human behaviour is best predicted from an understanding of the interaction ppeoplehave with their meaningful environments. He is an *interactionist*, meaning he believes that neither environment itself nor the individual is completely responsible for behaviour. Instead, he holds that people's cognitions, past histories, and expectations for the future are key in predicting behaviours - not just environment as believed by skinner. Mischel's cognitive social theory has much in common with Bandura and Rotter's theories as he believed in cognitive factors like subjective perceptions values etc. play important roles in developing the personality. His contributions to personality theory have evolved from research on delay of gratification to research regarding consistency and inconsistency of personality.

Julian Rotter was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1916. As a high school student, he became familiar with some of the writings of Freud and Adler, but he majored in chemistry rather than psychology at Brooklyn College. In 1941, he received a PhD in clinical psychology from Indiana University. After World War II, he took a position at Ohio State, where one of his students was Walter Mischel. In 1963, he moved to the University of Connecticut and has remained there since retirement.

Rotter's interactionist theory is based on five basic hypotheses. First, it assumes that humans interact with their meaningful environments: that is, human behavior stems from the interaction of environmental and personal factors (Rotter). How people interact with their environment depends on the meaning the attach to an event. Reinforcement is not dependent on external stimuli alone but is given meaning by the individual's cognitive capacity. Likewise, personal characteristics such as needs or traits cannot, by themselves, cause behaviour. behaviours stem's from the interaction of environment and personal factors. Second, human personality is learned, which suggests it can be changed or modified as long as people are capable of learning. Although our accumulation of our previous experiences gives us stability in our personalities, we are always responsive to change through new experiences. We learn from the past, but these are not absolute nor constant. They are colored by intervening experiences that effect present situations. Third, personality has a basic unity, suggesting that personality has some basic stability. New experiences are evaluated based on previous reinforcement. this leads to greater stability and unity in personality. Fourth, motivation is goal directed. People are not motivated primarily to reduce tension or seek pleasure. Instead, people's motivation for behaviour is due to goals set that they long to achieve. ex, college student put themselves through a great deal of stress and tension to achieve their goals. and fifth, people are capable of anticipating events, and thus they are capable of changing their environments and their personalities. They use their perceived movement in the direction of the anticipated event as criteria for evaluating reinforcers

reinforcement as any action, condition, or event which affects the individual's movement towards a goal.

Rotter suggested four variables that must be analyzed in order to make accurate predictions in any specific situation. These variables are behavior potential, expectancy, reinforcement value, and the psychological situation.

Behavior potential is the possibility that a particular response will occur at a given time and place in relation to its likely reinforcement. The behaviour potential in any situation is a function of both expectancy and reinforcement value.

People's expectancy in any given situation is their confidence that a particular reinforcement will follow a specific behavior in a specific situation or situations. Expectancies can be either general ,or specific, and the overall likelihood of success is a function of both generalized and specific expectancies.

Reinforcement value is a person's preference for any particular reinforcement over other reinforcements if all are equally likely to occur. *Internal* reinforcement is the individual's perception of an event, whereas *external* reinforcement refers to society's evaluation of an event. These may either be in harmony such as when you agree with your friends on a popular movie, or in contrary if your taste in movies runs differently to that of your friends. In this case, the internal and external reinforcements are in the discrepancy. Additionally, one's needs are key contributors to reinforcement. Specific reinforcement tends to increase in value when it satisfies a need. Reinforcements are also values higher depending on the future consequences towards other future reinforcements. People are capable of anticipating a sequence of events leading to some future goal and that the ultimate goal contributes to the reinforcement of each event in a sequence. *Reinforcement-reinforcement sequences* suggest that the value of an event is a function of one's expectation that a particular reinforcement will lead to future reinforcements.

The psychological situation is that part of the external and internal world to which a person is responding. Behavior is a function of the interaction of people with their meaningful environment.

Hypothetically, in any specific situation, behavior can be predicted by the basic prediction formula, which states that the potential for a behavior to occur in a particular situation in relation to a given reinforcement is a function of people's expectancy that their behavior will be followed by that reinforcement in that situation.

The basic prediction is too specific to give clues about how a person will generally behave.

To make more general predictions of behavior, one must know people's generalized expectancies, or their expectations based on similar past experiences that a given behavior will be reinforced. Generalized expectancies include people's needs, that is, behaviors that move them toward a goal.

Needs refer to functionally related categories of behaviors that lead to the same reinforcements. Ex. people can meet their recognition needs in a variety of different situations with many different people. Rotter listed six broad categories of needs, with each need being related to behaviors that lead to the same or similar reinforcements: (1) recognition-status refers to the need to excel, to achieve, and to have others recognize one's worth; (2) dominance is the need to control the behavior of others, to be in charge, or to gain power over others; (3) independence is the need to be free from the domination of others; (4) protection-dependence is the need to have others take care of us and to protect us from harm; (5) love and affection are needs to be warmly accepted by others and to be held in friendly regard; and (6) physical comfort includes those behaviors aimed at securing food, good health, and physical security. A need complex has three essential components. These components are analogs to the most specific concepts of behavior potential, expectancy, and reinforcement value. Three need components are: (1) need potential: the possible occurrences of a set of functionally related behaviors directed toward the satisfaction of similar goals; (2) freedom of movement, or a person's overall expectation of being reinforced for performing those behaviors that are directed toward satisfying some general need; and (3) need value, or the extent to which people prefer one set of reinforcements to another. Need components are analogous to the more specific concepts of behavior potential, expectancy, and reinforcement value.

The general prediction formula states that need potential is a function of freedom of movement and need value. Rotter's two most famous scales for measuring generalized expectancies are the Internal-External Control Scale and the Interpersonal Trust Scale.

The Internal-External Control Scale (popularly called "locus of control scale") attempts to measure the degree to which people perceive a causal relationship between their own efforts and environmental consequences.

The Interpersonal Trust Scale measures the extent to which a person expects the word or promise of another person to be true.

Rotter defined maladaptive behavior as any persistent behavior that fails to move a person closer to a desired goal. It is usually the result of unrealistically high goals in combination with low ability to achieve them.

In general, the goal of Rotter's therapy is to achieve harmony between a client's freedom of movement and need value. The therapist is actively involved in trying to (1) change the client's goals and (2) eliminate the client's low expectancies for success.

Maladaptive behaviors follow from three categories of inappropriate goals: (1) conflict between goals in this situation a therapist may try to help the client see how these specific behaviours are related to each of their needs and proceed to work with them in changing the value of one or both needs. By altering need value, patients gradually begin to behave more consistently and to experience greater freedom and movement in obtaining their goals, (2) destructive goals: one patient pursues consistently self-destructive behaviour that results inevitably in punishment. the job of the therapist is to point out the detrimental behaviour nd positively reinforce behaviour that moves away from this destructive goals. and (3) unrealistically lofty goals are set. High goals that can't is met lead to failure and pain. A therapist in this situation may try to get the patient to be more realistic in their goal setting and realistically reevaluate and lower exaggerated goals by reducing the reinforcement values of these goals.

In helping clients change low expectancies of success, Rotter uses a variety of approaches, including reinforcing positive behaviors, ignoring inappropriate behaviors, giving advice, modeling appropriate behaviors, and pointing out the long-range consequences of both positive and negative behaviors.

Like Bandura and Rotter, Mischel believes that cognitive factors, such as expectancies, subjective perceptions, values, goals, and personal standards are important in shaping personality. In his early theory, Mischel seriously questioned the consistency of personality, but more recently, he and Yuichi Shoda have advanced the notion that behavior is also a function of relatively stable cognitive-affective units.

Walter Mischel was born in Vienna in 1930, the second son of upper-middle-class parents. When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, his family moved to the United States and eventually settled in Brooklyn. Mischel received an MA from City College of New York and a PhD from Ohio State, where he was influenced by Julian Rotter. He is currently a professor at Columbia University.

Mischel originally believed that human behavior was mostly a function of the situation, but more lately he has recognized the importance of relatively permanent cognitive-affective units. Nevertheless, Mischel's theory continues to recognize the apparent inconsistency of some behaviors.

The consistency paradox refers to the observation that, although both lay people and professionals tend to believe that behavior is quite consistent, research suggests that it is not. Mischel recognizes that, indeed, some traits are consistent over time, but he contends that there is little evidence to suggest they are consistent from one situation to another.

Mischel believes that behavior is best predicted from an understanding of the person, the situation, and the interaction between person and situation. Thus, behavior is not the result of some global personality trait, but rather of people's perceptions of themselves in a particular situation.

However, Mischel does not believe that inconsistencies in behavior are due solely to the situation; he recognizes that inconsistent behaviors reflect stable patterns of variation within a person. He and Shoda see these stable variations in behavior in the following framework: If A, then X; but if B, then Y. People's pattern of variability is their behavioral signature, or their unique and stable pattern of behaving differently in different situations.

Mischel's basic theoretical position for predicting and explaining behavior is as follows: If personality is a stable system that processes information about the situation, then as people encounter different situations, they should behave differently as those situations vary. Therefore, Mischel believes that, even though people's behavior may reflect some stability over time, it tends to vary as situations vary.

Situation variables include all those stimuli that people attend to in a given situation.

Cognitive-affective units include all those psychological, social, and physiological aspects of people that permit them to interact with their environment with some stability in their behavior. Mischel identified five such units. First, are encoding strategies or people's individualized manner of categorizing information they receive from external stimuli. People use the cognitive process to transform these stimuli into persona constructs, including their self-concept, their view of other people, and their way of looking at the world. Second are the competencies and self-regulatory strategies. One of the most important of these competencies is intelligence, which Mischel argues is responsible for the apparent consistency of other traits. In addition, people use self-regulatory strategies to control their own behavior through self-formulated goals and self-produced consequences. The third cognitive-affective units are expectancies and beliefs, or people's guesses about the consequences of each of the different behavioral possibilities. The fourth cognitive-affective unit includes people's subjective goals and values, which tend to render behavior fairly consistent. Mischel's fifth cognitive-affective unit includes affective responses, including emotions, feelings, and the affect that accompanies physiological reactions.

The theories of both Rotter and Mischel have sparked an abundance of related research, with Rotter's locus of control being one of the most frequently researched areas in psychology, and Mischel's notion of delay of gratification, and Mischel and Shoda's cognitive-affective personality system also receiving wide attention.

During the genocide of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during World War II, only one half of one percent of people in Nazi-occupied territory helped Jewish neighbors whose lives were in peril (Oliner & Oliner, 1988), in part because the peril to their own lives equaled the danger to the lives of those they assisted. Elizabeth Midlarsky and her colleagues wanted to use personality variables to predict who was a Holocaust hero and who was a bystander during World War II (Midlarsky, Fagin Jones, & Corley, 2005). One of the personality variables they selected was locus of control, along with autonomy, risk taking, social responsibility, authoritarianism, empathy, and altruistic moral reasoning. They found that internal locus of control was positively related to more autonomy, risk taking, sense of social responsibility, tolerance, empathy, and altruistic moral reasoning, and to less authoritarianism. Statistical analysis supported the researchers' hypothesis that personality would predict who was a hero and who was not, being correct 93% of the time. A higher sense of internal control was associated with heroism in this study.

Mischel and associates have reported hundreds of studies influenced by his cognitive-affective personality system. These studies—which are based on the statement, "If I am in situation A, then I do X; but If I am in situation B, then I do Y." These studies have generally supported Mischel and Shoda's conception of the conditional nature of human behavior. One of Mischel's students, Lara Kammrath, and her colleagues recently conducted an elegant study (2005) illustrating the "If...then..." framework very clearly (Kammrath, Mendoza-Denton, & Mischel, 2005). This study showed that people understand the if-then framework and use it when judging others; in other words, the average person understands that people behave differently in different situations, and depending on their personality, people adjust their behavior to match the situation. Mischel and colleagues conducted further studies on the conditional nature of dispositions (Mendoza-Denton, Ayduck, Mischel, Shoda, &Testa, 2001), and found that conditional and interactionist self-evaluations tend to buffer negative reactions to failure. They concluded that their conceptualization of the person-situation environment as social-cognitive and interactionist is more applicable to understanding human behavior than the traditional, "decontextualized" views of personality, in which people behave in a given way regardless of the context.

Cognitive social learning theory combines the rigors of learning theory with the speculative assumption that people are forward-looking beings. It rates high on generating research, internal consistency; it rates about average on its ability to be falsified, to organize data, and to guide action.

Rotter and Mischel see people as goal-directed, cognitive animals whose perceptions of events are more crucial than the events themselves. Cognitive social learning theory rates very high on social influences, and high on the uniqueness of the individual, free choice, teleology, and conscious processes. On the dimension of optimism versus pessimism, Rotter's view is slightly more optimistic, whereas Mischel's is about in the middle.

that the source of control is generally within themselves

the situation

more highly valued than one that satisfies a weak need

people are capable of anticipating events

Rotter's social learning theory includes the notion that people have the ability to see a casual connection between their behvaiour and the occurence of a reinforcer. People have the tendency not to increase their feelings of personal control after experiencing success and others do not lower their expectancies after repeated failures. Rotter suggests that both the situation and the person contrinbute to the feelings of personal control. To assess internal and external control (or locus control) he created the Internal-External Control Scale. It consists of 29 forced-choice items; 23 are scored and 6 are fillers. The scale is scored in the direction of external control so that 23 is the highest external score and 0 is the highest internal score. The scale attempts to measure the degree to which people perceive a casual relationship between their own efforts and environmental consequences. People who score high on internal control generally beleive the source of control resides within themselves and they exercise a high level of personal control in most situations. Those that score high on external control generally believe that their life is controlled by outside forces. Scores inclined to internal control, without being extreme, are the most healthy and desirable.