Bandura: Social Cognitive Theory

● Chance encounters and fortuitous events have been largely ignored by most
personality theorists, even though most of us recognize that we have had
unplanned experiences that have greatly changed our lives.
● Social cognitive theory rests on several basic assumptions:
○ The outstanding characteristic of humans is plasticity.
■ Humans have the flexibility to learn a variety of behaviors in diverse
situations.
■ Bandura put more emphasis on vicarious learning--learning by
observing others.
■ Indirect reinforcement accounts for a good bit of human learning.
○ Through a triadic reciprocal causation model that includes behavioral,
environmental, 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 standards to evaluate present
experiences.
■ Two important environmental forces in the triadic model are
chance encounters and fortuitous events.
○ Social cognitive theory takes an agentic perspective--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 systems.
■ One important component of the TRC model is self-efficacy--the
confidence that humans can perform those behaviors that will
produce desired behaviors in a particular situation.
■ Proxy agency and collective efficacy can predict performance.
● Proxy agency--people are able to rely on others for goods
and services.
● Collective efficacy--people’s shared beliefs that they can
bring about change.
○ People regulate their conduct through both external and internal factors.
■ External factors--people’s physical and social environment.
■ Internal factors--includes self-observation, judgmental process,
and self-reaction.
○ People attempt to regulate their behavior through moral agency.
● Full name: Albert Bandura
BIOGRAPHY
● December 4. 1925 - present 2021 (age 95)
● The only boy of five older sisters.
● Bandura was encouraged by his sisters to be independent and self-reliant.
● He also learned self-directiveness in his school that only had a few teachers and
little resources.
 ● Bandura told Richard Evans that his decision to become a psychologist was quite
accidental (fortuitous event).
○ Because Bandura commuted to school with pre-med and engineering
students who were early risers, rather than doing nothing, he decided to
enroll in a psychology course.
● Most of Bandura’s early publications were in clinical psychology, dealing primarily
with psychotherapy and the Rorschach Test.
● Bandura collaborated with the late Richard H. Walters, his first doctoral student, to
publish a paper on aggressive delinquents--Adolescent Aggression.
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LEARNING
● Although people can and do learn from direct experience, much of what they learn
is acquired through observing others.
● If knowledge could be acquired only through the effects of one’s own actions, the
process of cognitive and social development would be greatly retarded, not
mention exceedingly tedious.

OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING
● Bandura believes that observation allows people to learn without performing any
behavior.
● Bandura differs from Skinner who held that enactive behavior is the basic datum of
psychological science, and that Bandura believes that reinforcement is not
essential to learning.
○ Although reinforcement facilitates learning, Bandura says that it is not a
necessary condition for it.
● Bandura believes that observational learning is much more efficient than learning
through direct experience.
● By observing other people, humans are spared countless responses that might be
followed by punishment or by no reinforcement.
○ E.g. children observe characters on television and repeat what they hear or
see.

MODELING
● The core of observational learning is modeling.
● Learning through modeling involves adding and subtracting from the observed
behavior and generalizing from one observation to another.
● Modeling involves cognitive processes and is not simply mimicry or imitation.
○ It involves symbolically representing information and storing it for use at a
future time.
● Several factors determine whether a person will learn from a model in any
particular situation:
○ The characteristics of the model
 ■ People are more likely to model high-status people rather than
those of low status, competent individuals rather than unskilled or
incompetent ones, and powerful people rather thatn impotent ones.
○ The characteristics of the observer
■ People who lack status, skill, or power are most likely to model.
■ Children and novices are more likely to model.
○ The consequences of the behavior being modeled
■ The greater the value an observer places on a behavior, the more
likely the observer will acquire the behavior.
■ Learning may be facilitated when the observer views a model
receiving severe punishment (e.g. seeing a person receive a severe
shock from touching an electric wire teaches the observer a
valuable lesson).

PROCESSES GOVERNING OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING

1. ATTENTION
● Before we can model another person, we must attend to that person.
● What factors regulate attention?
○ We are most likely to attend to people whom we frequently associate with.
○ Attractive models are more likely to be observed than unattractive ones.
(e.g. popular figures we see on TV)
○ The nature of the behavior being modeled; we observe behavior that we
think is important or valuable to us.
2. REPRESENTATION
● In order for observation to lead to new response patterns, those patterns must be
symbolically represented in memory.
● Symbolic representation need not be verbal, because some observations are
retained in imagery and can be summoned in the absence of the physical model.
● Verbal coding greatly speeds the process of observational learning.
○ With language, we can verbally evaluate our behaviors and decide which
ones we wish to discard and which ones we desire to try.
○ This also helps us to rehearse the behavior symbolically--to tell ourselves
over and over again how we will perform the behavior once given the
chance.
● Rehearsal aids the retention process and can entail the actual performance of the
modeled response.
3. BEHAVIORAL PRODUCTION
● After attending to a model and retaining what we have observed, we then
produce the behavior.
● In converting cognitive representations intro appropriate actions, we must ask
ourselves several questions about the behavior to be modeled:
○ How can I do this?--symbolically rehearsing.
○ What am I doing?--monitoring ourselves.
○ Am I doing this right?--evaluate our performance.
4. MOTIVATION
● Observational learning is most effective when learners are motivated to perform
the modeled behavior.
 ● Performance is facilitated by motivation to enact that particular behavior.
○ Even though observation of others may teach us how to do something, we
may have no desire to perform the necessary action.
○ E.g. sidewalk superintendents have no wish to emulate the observed
construction worker.

ENACTIVE LEARNING
● Every response a person makes is followed by some consequence.
● Complex human behavior can be learned when people think about and evaluate the
consequences of their behaviors.
● The consequences of a response serve at least 3 functions:
○ Response consequences inform us of the effects of our actions.
■ Retaining the information and using it as a guide for future actions.
○ The consequences of our responses motivate our anticipatory behavior.
■ We are capable of symbolically representing future outcomes and
acting accordingly.
■ We possess both insight and foresight.
■ E.g. We anticipate the effects of cold, wet weather and dress
accordingly.
○ The consequences of responses serve to reinforce behavior.
■ Although reinforcement may at times be unconscious and
automatic, complex behavioral patterns are greatly facilitated by
cognitive intervention.
■ Learning occurs much more efficiently when the learner is
cognitively involved in the learning situation and understands what
behaviors precede successful responses.

TRIADIC RECIPROCAL CAUSATION (TRC)

● This system assumes that human action is a result of an interaction among 3
variables:
○ ENVIRONMENT
○ BEHAVIOR
○ PERSON
● By “person”, he means largely, but not exclusively, such cognitive factors as
memory, anticipation, planning, and judging.
○ Bandura hypothesized that “people evoke different reactions from their
social environment by their physical characteristics—such as their age, size,
race, sex, and physical attractiveness—even before they say or do anything”.
● Cognition at least partially determines which environmental events people attend
to, what value they place on these events, and how they organize these events for
future use.
○ Although cognition can have a strong causal effect on both environment
and behavior, it is not an autonomous entity, independent of those two
variables.
● Cognition itself is determined, being formed by both behavior and environment.
 ● Bandura uses the term “reciprocal” to indicate a triadic interaction of forces, not a
similar or opposite counteraction.
● The relative potency of the three varies with the individual and with the situation.
○ Although behavior and environment can at times be the most powerful
contributor to performance, cognition (person) is usually the strongest
contributor to performance.
● Bandura’s concept of triadic reciprocal causation assumes that behavior is learned
as a result of a mutual interaction of (1) the person, including cognition and
neurophysiological processes; (2) the environment, including interpersonal
relations and socioeconomic conditions; and (3) behavioral factors, including
previous experiences with reinforcement.

AN EXAMPLE OF TRIADIC RECIPROCAL CAUSATION

● A child begging her father for a second brownie is, from the father’s viewpoint, an
environmental event. (E → B)
○ If the father automatically (without thought) were to five the child a second
brownie, then 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 counter controlling effect on his
environment, namely his child.
● However, the father is capable of thinking about the consequences of rewarding or
ignoring the child’s behavior. (E → P)
○ “If I give her another brownie, she will stop crying temporarily, but in future
cases, she will be more likely to persist until I give in to her.” (P → B)
○ Hence, the father has an effect on both his environment (the child) and his
own behavior (rejecting his daughter’s request). (B → E)
○ The child’s subsequent behavior (father’s environment) helps shape the
cognition and the behavior of the father.
● If the child stops begging, the father may then have other thoughts and evaluate his
behavior by thinking “I’m a good father because I did the right thing.” (B → P)
● The father, then, by virtue of his role and status as a father and perhaps in
conjunction with his size and strength, has a decided effect on the child. (P → E)
● The change in environment also allows the father to pursue different behaviors.
● His subsequent behavior is partially determined by the reciprocal interaction of his
environment, cognition, and behavior.

CHANCE ENCOUNTERS AND FORTUITOUS EVENTS

 ● Although people can and do exercise a significant amount of control over their
lives, they cannot predict or anticipate all possible environmental changes.
● Chance encounter--an unintended meeting of persons unfamiliar to each other.
● Fortuitous event--an environmental experience that is unexpected and unintended.
● The everyday lives of people are affected to a greater or lesser extent by the people
they chance to meet and by random events they could not predict.
○ One’s marital partner, occupation, and place of residence may largely be the
result of a fortuitous meeting.
● Fortuity adds a separate dimension in any scheme used to predict human behavior,
and it makes accurate predictions practically impossible.
● Chance encounters influence people only by entering the TRC paradigm at point E
and adding to the mutual interaction of person, behavior, and environment.
○ Chance encounters influence people in the same manner as do planned
events. Once a chance encounter occurs, people behave toward their new
acquaintance according to their attitudes, belief systems, and interests, as
well as to the other person’s reaction to them.
● People can make chance happen.
○ A divorced man looking for an opportunity to remarry will increase his
chance of meeting a potential wife by pursuing a proactive course of action
by joining a singles club, etc.
○ Conversely, the prepared person is able to escape unpleasant chance
encounters and chance misfortunes by anticipating their possibility and
taking steps to minimize any negative impact they may have on future
development.
● “Chance favors only the prepared mind.”--Louis Pasteur.

HUMAN AGENCY
● Human agency is the essence of humanness.
● Bandura believes that people are:
○ SELF-REGULATING
○ PROACTIVE
○ SELF-REFLECTIVE
○ SELF-ORGANIZING
● People also have the power to influence their own actions to produce desired
consequences.
● Human agency is not a thing but an active process of exploring, manipulating, and
influencing the environment in order to attain desired outcomes.

CORE FEATURES OF HUMAN AGENCY

1. INTENTIONALITY
● Intentionality refers to acts a person performs intentionally.
● An intention includes planning, but it also involves actions.
● “It is not simply an expectation or prediction of future actions but a proactive
commitment to bringing them about”.
● People continually change their plans as they become aware of the consequences
of their actions.
2. FORETHOUGHT
 ● Forethought--to set goals; to anticipate likely outcomes of their actions, and to
select behaviors that will produce desired outcomes and avoid undesirable ones.
● This enables people to break free from the constraints of their environment.
● People are “constantly shifting direction to conform to whatever influence
happened to impinge upon them at the moment”.
3. SELF-REACTIVENESS
● People are also capable of self-reactiveness in the process of motivating and
regulating their own actions.
● People not only make choices but they monitor their progress toward fulfilling
these choices.
● Bandura recognizes that setting goals is not sufficient to attaining desired
consequences. Goals must be specific, be within a person’s ability to achieve, and
reflect potential accomplishments that are not too far in the future.
4. SELF-REFLECTIVENESS
● Self-reflectiveness--people are examiners of their own functioning.
● They can think about and evaluate their motivations, values, and the meanings of
their life goals, and they can think about the adequacy of their own thinking.
● They can also evaluate the effect that other people’s actions have on them.

SELF-EFFICACY
● People’s most crucial self-reflective mechanism is self-efficacy--their beliefs that
they are capable of performing actions that will produce a desired effect.
○ 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 they can or cannot execute
the behavior necessary to produce desired outcomes in any particular
situation.
○ Bandura also defined self efficacy as “people’s beliefs in their capability to
exercise some measure of control over their own functioning and over
environmental events.”
● People’s beliefs in their personal efficacy influence what courses of action they
choose to pursue, 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.
● Self-efficacy is not the sole determinant of behavior, rather, it combines with
environment, prior behavior, and other personal variables, especially outcome
expectations, to produce behavior.
● Self-efficacy refers to the P (person) factor in the TRC.
● 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.
● Self-efficacy is not the expectation of our action’s outcomes.

● Bandura distinguished between efficacy expectations and outcome

expectations:
 ○ Efficacy--people’s confidence that they have the ability to perform certain
behaviors.
○ Outcome expectancy--one’s prediction of the likely consequences of that
behavior.
● Outcome must not be confused with successful accomplishment of an act; it refers
to the consequences of behavior, not the completion of the act itself.
○ E.g. a job applicant may have confidence that she will perform well during a
job interview, have the ability to answer any possible questions, remain
relaxed, controlled, and exhibit an appropriate level of friendly behavior.
However, despite these high efficacy expectations, she may have low
outcome expectations. A low outcome expectancy would exist if she
believes that she has little chance of being offered a position (due to
unpromising environmental conditions, high unemployment, depressed
economy, or superior competition, even other personal factors such as age,
gender, height, weight, etc.)
● Self-efficacy must be distinguished from several other concepts:
○ Efficacy does not refer to the ability to execute basic motor skills such as
walking, reaching, or grasping.
○ Efficacy does not imply that we can perform designated behaviors without
anxiety, stress, or fear.
■ Efficacy is merely a judgement, accurate or faulty, about whether or
not we can execute the required actions.
○ Judgments of efficacy are not the same as levels of aspiration. (e.g. heroin
addicts often aspire to be drug free but may have little confidence in their
ability to successfully break the habit.)
● Self-efficacy is not a global or generalized concept, such as self-esteem or self-
confidence.
○ It varies from situation to situation depending on the competencies
required for different activities. (e.g. the presence/absence of people,
perceived competence, physiological states, etc.)
● High and low efficacy combine with responsive and unresponsive environments
to produce 4 possible predictive variables.
○ High efficacy + responsive environment = successful outcomes.
○ Low efficacy + responsive environment = people may become depressed
when they observe that others are successful at tasks that seem too
difficult for them.
○ High efficacy + unresponsive environment = usually intensify their efforts
to change the environment (protest, social activism, etc.), and if all efforts
fail, they will either give up or take on a new course that will seek a more
responsive environment.
○ Low efficacy + unresponsive environment = people feel apathy,
resignation, and helplessness.

WHAT CONTRIBUTES TO SELF EFFICACY?

● Personal efficacy is acquired, enhanced, or decreased through any one or
combination of 4 sources:
1. MASTERY EXPERIENCES
 ● Mastery experiences--past performances.
● Successful performance raises efficacy expectancies; failure tends to lower them.
● Has 6 corollaries:
○ Successful performance raises self-efficacy in proportion to the difficulty
of the task. (e.g. volleyball players gain much by performing well against
superior opponents than inferior ones.)
○ Tasks successfully accomplished by oneself are more efficacious than
those completed with the help of others. (e.g. team accomplishments do
not increase personal efficacy as much as do individual achievements.)
○ Failure is most likely to decrease efficacy when we know that we put forth
our best effort. To fail when only half-trying is not as inefficacious as to fall
short in spite of our best efforts.
○ Failure under conditions of high emotional arousal or distress is not as self-
debilitating as failure under maximal conditions.
○ Failure prior to establishing a sense of mastery is more detrimental to
feelings of personal efficacy than later failure.
○ Occasional failure has little effect on efficacy, especially for people with a
generally high expectancy of success.
2. SOCIAL MODELING
● Social modeling--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 to us, social modeling will have little effect on
our self-efficacy.
● The effects of social modeling are not as strong as those of personal performance
in raising levels of efficacy, but they can have powerful effects where inefficacy is
concerned. (e.g. Watching a swimmer of equal ability fail to negotiate a choppy
river will likely dissuade the observer from attempting the same task.)
● The effects of this vicarious experience may even last a lifetime.
3. SOCIAL PERSUASION
● The effects of this source are limited, but under proper conditions, persuasion
from others can raise or lower self-efficacy.
○ Person must believe the persuader.
○ Boosting self-efficacy through social persuasion will be effective only if the
activity one is being encouraged to try is within one’s repertoire of behavior.
● Bandura hypothesizes that the efficacious power of suggestion is directly related
to the perceived status and authority of the persuader.
○ E.g. A psychotherapist's suggestion to phobic patients that they can ride in
a crowded elevator is more likely to increase self-efficacy than will
encouragement from one’s spouse or children.
● Persuasion may convince someone to attempt an activity, and if performance is
successful, both the accomplishment and the subsequent verbal rewards will
increase future efficacy.
4. PHYSICAL AND EMOTIONAL STATES
● Strong emotion ordinarily lowers performance; when people experience intense
fear, acute anxiety, or high levels of stress, they are likely to have lower efficacy
 expectancies. (e.g. an actor that memorized his lines but has a fear of a mental
block.)
○ Incidentally, for some situations, emotional arousal, if not too intense, is
associated with increased performance, so that moderate anxiety felt by
that actor on opening night may raise his efficacy expectancies.
● Psychotherapists have long recognized that a reduction in anxiety or an increase in
physical relaxation can facilitate performance.
● Arousal information is related to several variables:
○ The level of arousal--the higher the arousal, the lower the self-efficacy.
○ The perceived realism of the arousal.
■ However, when one is cognizant of the absurdity of the phobia—for
example, fear of the outdoors—then the emotional arousal tends to
lower efficacy.
○ The nature of the task.
● Emotional arousal is likely to interfere with performance of complex activities than
simple tasks.

PROXY AGENCY
● Proxy involves indirect control over those social conditions that affect everyday
living.
● “No one has the time, energy, and resources to master every realm of everyday life.
Successful functioning necessarily involves a blend of reliance on proxy agency in
some areas of functioning”.
● In modern American society, people would be nearly helpless if they relied solely on
personal accomplishments to regulate their lives since not all people do not have
the personal capability to repair an air conditioner, a camera, or a car.
● Through proxy agency, people can accomplish their goal by relying on other people
to repair these objects. (e.g. they rely on international news services to learn of
recent events.)
● Proxy has a downside:
○ By relying too much on the competence and power of others, people may
weaken their sense of personal and collective efficacy.
○ E.g. one spouse may become dependent on the other to care for the
household.

COLLECTIVE EFFICACY
● Collective efficacy--people’s shared beliefs in their collective power to produce
desired results.
○ The confidence people have that their combined efforts will bring about
group accomplishments.
● There are 2 techniques for measuring collective efficacy:
○ Combine individual members’ evaluations of their personal capabilities to
enact behaviors that benefit the group. (e.g. actors in a play would have
high collective efficacy if everyone had confidence in their personal ability.)
○ Measure the confidence each person has in the group’s ability to bring
about a desired outcome. (e.g. baseball players may have little confidence
 in each of their teammates but possess high confidence that their team will
perform quite well.)
● Collective efficacy does not spring from a collective “mind” but rather from the
personal efficacy of many individuals working together.
● People may have high self-efficacy but low collective efficacy.
○ E.g. a woman may have high personal efficacy that she can pursue a healthy
lifestyle, but have low collective efficacy that she can reduce environmental
pollution, hazardous working conditions, or the threat of infectious disease.
● Different cultures have different levels of collective efficacy and work more
productively under different systems.
○ People in the United States, an individualistic culture, feel greater self-
efficacy and work best under an individually oriented system, whereas
people in China, a collectivist culture, feel greater collective efficacy and
work best under a group oriented system.
● Factors that can undermine collective efficacy:
○ Humans live in a transnational world; what happens in one part of the
globe can affect people in other countries, giving them a sense of
helplessness. (e.g. destruction of Amazon rainforests, depletion of the
ozone layer.)
○ Recent technology that people neither understand nor believe that they
can control may lower their sense of collective efficacy. (e.g.
computerized controls in modern automobiles will make moderately skilled
mechanics lose personal efficacy for repairing vehicles, as well as collective
efficacy for reversing the trend that doesn’t require technology.)
○ The complex social machinery, with layers of bureaucracy that prevent
social change. (e.g. people who attempt to change bureaucratic structures
are often discouraged by failure or by the long lapse of time between their
actions and any noticeable change.)
○ The tremendous scope and magnitude of human problems. (e.g. wars,
famine, overpopulation, crime, and natural disasters.)
● Bandura believes that positive changes are possible if people will persevere with
their collective efforts and not become discouraged.

SELF-REGULATION
● When people have high levels of self-efficacy, are confident in their reliance on
proxies, and possess solid collective efficacy, they will have considerable capacity
to regulate their own behavior.
● People use both reactive and proactive strategies for self-regulation.
○ They reactively attempt to reduce the discrepancies between their
accomplishments and their goal.
○ After they close those discrepancies, they proactively set newer and higher
goals for themselves.
● “People motivate and guide their actions through proactive control by setting
themselves valued goals that create a state of disequilibrium and then mobilizing
their abilities and effort based on anticipatory estimation of what is required to
reach the goals”.
 ○ People are motivated at least as much to create tension as to reduce it.
(Allport’s)
● What processes contribute to this self-regulation?
○ People possess limited ability to manipulate the external factors that feed
into the reciprocal interactive paradigm.
○ People are capable of monitoring their own behavior and evaluating it in
terms of both proximate and distant goals.

EXTERNAL FACTORS IN SELF-REGULATION

● External factors affect self-regulation in at least two ways:
○ They provide us with a standard for evaluating our own behavior.
■ Standards do not stem solely from internal forces. Environmental
factors, interacting with personal influences, shape individual
standards for evaluation.
■ E.g. we learn from parents and teachers the value of honest and
friendly behavior; by direct experience, we value being warm and dry
than cold and wet.
○ External factors influence self-regulation by providing the means for
reinforcement.
■ Intrinsic rewards are not always sufficient; we also need incentives
that emanate from external factors.
■ E.g. an artist may require more reinforcement (monetary or praise
and encouragement) than self-satisfaction to complete a large
mural.
● Self-reward for inadequate performance is likely to result in environmental
sanctions--friend criticizing or mocking the artist’s work, withdrawing financial
support, or the artist being self-critical.
● When performance does not meet self-standards, we tend to withhold rewards
from ourselves.

INTERNAL FACTORS IN SELF-REGULATION

1. SELF-OBSERVATION
● We must be able to monitor our own performance, even though the attention we
give to it need not be complete or even accurate.
● We attend selectively to some aspects of our behavior and ignore others
altogether.
● What we observe depends on interests and other preexisting self-conceptions.
○ In achievement situations, we pay attention to the quality, quantity, speed,
or originality of our work.
○ In interpersonal situations, we monitor the sociability or morality of our
conduct.
2. JUDGMENTAL PROCESSES
● Judgmental processes help us regulate our behavior through the process of
cognitive mediation.
● We are capable not only of reflective self-awareness but also of judging the worth
of our actions on the basis of goals we have set for ourselves.
 ● The judgmental process depends on:
○ PERSONAL STANDARDS
■ Allows us to evaluate our performances without comparing them to
the conduct of others. (e.g. a handicapped child will highly prize
tying their shoelaces, not undervaluing her achievement despite
that other children can perform this well.)
○ REFERENTIAL PERFORMANCES
■ We evaluate our performances by comparing them to a standard of
reference. (e.g. students comparing test scores with their
classmates.)
○ VALUATION OF ACTIVITY
■ Dependance on the overall value we place on an activity. (e.g.
placing minor value on dishwashing, spending little time trying to
improve it, than placing a high value on professional degrees.)
○ PERFORMANCE ATTRIBUTION
■ Dependance on how we judge the causes of our behavior.
■ If we believe that our success is due to our own efforts, we will
take pride in our accomplishments and tend to work harder to attain
our goals.
■ If we attribute our performance to external factors, we will not
derive as much self-satisfaction and will probably not put forth
strenuous effort to attain our goals.
■ If we believe that we are responsible for our own failures or
inadequate performance, we will work more readily toward self-
regulation than if we are convinced that our shortcomings and our
fears are due to factors beyond our control.
3. SELF-REACTION
● People respond positively or negatively to their behaviors depending on how these
behaviors measure up to their personal standards.
○ People create incentives for their own actions through self-reinforcement
or self-punishment.
● People set standards for performance that, when met, tend to regulate behavior by
such self-produced rewards as pride and self satisfaction. When people fail to meet
their standards, their behavior is followed by self-dissatisfaction or self-criticism.
● Bandura hypothesizes that people work to attain rewards and to avoid punishments
according to self-erected standards.

SELF-REGULATION THROUGH MORAL AGENCY

● Bandura sees moral agency as having 2 aspects:
○ Doing no harm to people.
○ Proactively helping people.
● Bandura insists that moral precepts predict moral behavior only when those
precepts are converted to action.
● Self-regulatory influences are not automatic but operate only if they are activated--
selective activation.
● How can people with strong moral beliefs concerning the worth and dignity of all
humankind behave in an inhumane manner to other humans?
 ○ “People do not ordinarily engage in reprehensible conduct until they have
justified to themselves the morality of their actions”.
○ By justifying the morality of their actions, they can separate or disengage
themselves from the consequences of their behavior--disengagement of
internal control.
● Disengagement techniques allow people, individually or working in concert with
others, to engage in inhumane behaviors while retaining their moral standards.
○ E.g. politicians frequently convince their constituents of the morality of
war--wars are fought against “evil” people, people who deserve to be
defeated or even annihilated.

● Various mechanisms through which self-control is disengaged or selectively

activated:

REDEFINE THE BEHAVIOR

● With redefinition of behavior, people justify otherwise reprehensible actions by a
cognitive restructuring that allows them to minimize or escape responsibility.
● There are 3 techniques:
○ MORAL JUSTIFICATION
■ Culpable behavior is made to seem defensible or even noble.
■ E.g. war killings are justified as morally defensible.
○ PALLIATIVE COMPARISONS
■ Make advantageous comparisons between that behavior and the
even greater atrocities committed by others.
■ E.g. a child who vandalizes a school building uses the excuse that
others broke even more windows.
○ EUPHEMISTIC LABELS
■ E.g. some Nazi leaders called the murder of millions of Jews the
“purification of Europe” or “the final solution.”

DISREGARD OR DISTORT THE CONSEQUENCES OF BEHAVIOR

● A second method of avoiding responsibility involves distorting or obscuring the
relationship between the behavior and its detrimental consequences.
● There are 3 techniques:
 ○ MINIMIZE THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR BEHAVIOR
■ E.g. a driver running on a red light and striking a pedestrian might
say that the injured and unconscious party is “not hurt badly” and
that “she’s going to be okay!”
○ DISREGARD OR IGNORE THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR ACTIONS
■ When they do not see firsthand the harmful effects of their
behavior.
■ E.g. army generals seldom view the total destruction in wartime and
deaths resulted from their decisions.
○ DISTORT OR MISCONSTRUE THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR ACTIONS
■ E.g. when a parent beats a child badly enough to cause serious
bruises but explains that the child needs discipline in order to
mature properly.

DEHUMANIZE OR BLAME THE VICTIMS

● People can obscure responsibility for their actions by either dehumanizing their
victims or attributing blame to them.
● At various times in U.S. history, Jews, African Americans, Hispanic Americans,
Native Americans, Asian Americans, homosexuals, and street people have become
dehumanized victims.
● When victims are not dehumanized, they are sometimes blamed for the
perpetrator’s culpable conduct.
○ E.g. a rapist may blame his victim for his crime, citing her provocative dress
or behavior.

DISPLACE OR DIFFUSE RESPONSIBILITY

● The fourth method of dissociating actions from their consequences is to displace
or diffuse responsibility.
● Displacement--people minimize the consequences of their actions by placing
responsibility on an outside source.
○ E.g. college student who blames his professor for low grades.
● Diffuse responsibility--to spread it so thin that no one person is responsible.
○ E.g. A civil servant may diffuse responsibility for her actions throughout the
entire bureaucracy with such comments as “That’s the way things are done
around here” or “That’s just policy.”

DYSFUNCTIONAL BEHAVIOR
1. DEPRESSION
● Failure frequently leads to depression, and depressed people often undervalue
their own accomplishments.
○ The result is chronic misery, feelings of worthlessness, lack of
purposefulness, and pervasive depression.
● Can occur in any of the 3 self-regulatory subfunctions:
○ SELF-OBSERVATION
 ■ Depressed people tend to exaggerate their past mistakes and
minimize their prior accomplishments.
○ JUDGMENTAL PROCESSES
■ They set their standards unrealistically high so that any personal
accomplishment will be judged as a failure.
○ SELF-REACTIONS
■ Depressed people not only judge themselves harshly, but they are
also inclined to treat themselves badly for their shortcomings.
2. PHOBIAS
● Phobias and fears are learned by direct contact, inappropriate generalization, and
especially by observational experiences.
○ They are difficult to extinguish if the phobic person simply avoids the
threatening object.
● Bandura credits television and other news media for generating many of our fears.
○ Well-publicized rapes, armed robberies, or murders can terrorize a
community, causing people to live more confined lives behind locked doors.
● Once established, phobias are maintained by consequent determinants--the
negative reinforcement the phobic person receives for avoiding the fear producing
situation.
○ E.g. people trying not to go near a park to reduce the threat of being
mugged.
3. AGGRESSION
● Bandura contended that aggressive behavior is acquired through observation of
others, direct experiences with positive and negative reinforcements, training, or
instruction, and bizarre beliefs.
● People continue to aggress for at least 5 reasons:
○ They enjoy inflicting injury on the victim (positive reinforcement).
○ They avoid or counter the aversive consequences of aggression by others
(negative reinforcement).
○ They receive injury or harm for not behaving aggressively (punishment).
○ They live up to their personal standards of conduct by their aggressive
behavior (self-reinforcement).
○ They observe others receiving rewards for aggressive acts or
punishment for nonaggressive behavior.
● Bandura believes that aggressive actions ordinarily lead to further aggression.
○ Bobo Doll experiment.
○ The study by Bandura, Ross, and Ross offered some of the earliest
experimental evidence that TV violence does not curb aggression; rather, it
produces additional aggressive behaviors.
THERAPY
● Therapeutic change is difficult because it involves eliminating behaviors that are
satisfying to the person.
○ E.g. smoking, overeating, drinking alcohol.
● The ultimate goal of social cognitive therapy is self-regulation.
○ To achieve this end, the therapist introduces strategies designed to induce
specific behavioral changes, to generalize those changes to other
situations, and to maintain those changes by preventing relapse.
 ● Bandura has suggested several basic treatment approaches:
○ OVERT OR VICARIOUS MODELING
■ People who observe live or filmed models performing threatening
activities often feel less fear and anxiety and are then able to
perform those same activities.
○ COVERT OR COGNITIVE MODELING
■ The therapist trains patients to visualize models performing
fearsome behaviors.
○ ENACTIVE MASTERY
■ Requires patients to perform those behaviors that previously
produced incapacitating fears.
● Patients typically begin by observing models or by having their emotional arousal
lessened through systematic desensitization--involves the extinction of anxiety or
fear through self-induced or therapist induced relaxation.
○ The therapist and patient work together to place fearsome situations on a
hierarchy from least to most threatening.
○ Patients, while relaxed, enact the least threatening behavior and then
gradually move through the hierarchy until they can perform the most
threatening activity, all the while remaining at a low state of emotional
arousal.
● Bandura believes that the reason for their effectiveness can be traced to a common
mechanism found in each of these approaches--cognitive mediation.
○ When they become convinced that they can perform difficult tasks, they
become able to cope with previously intimidating situations.

RELATED RESEARCH
● SELF-EFFICACY AND DIABETES
○ William Sacco and colleagues research results show that higher levels of
self-efficacy were related to lower levels of depression, increased
adherence to doctor’s orders, lower BMI, and fewer and decreased severity
of diabetes symptoms.
■ BMI was positively related to depression and adherence to doctor’s
orders was negatively related to depression.
■ Having a high BMI led people to feel less self-efficacy, which in turn
led to increased depression. Conversely, the increase in sense of
control over the disease was responsible for decreased depression.
● MORAL DISENGAGEMENT AND BULLYING
○ Moral disengagement--when we do bad things we can convince ourselves
that our behavior really was not bad or immoral—that the normal standards
of morality do not apply to us in that situation.
○ Bandura described mechanisms of moral disengagement that fall under:
■ Redefining or cognitively restructuring one’s behavior in a positive
light.
■ Minimizing the consequences of one’s role in the harm.
■ Disregarding or distorting the consequences of one’s harmful
behavior.
 ■ Stripping the victims of human qualities or blaming them for the
harm done to them.
○ Moral Disengagement Scale-self-report scales that measure proneness to
moral disengagement that capture these mechanisms.
○ Gini, Pozzoli, and Hymel concluded that the higher children and teens score
on the MDS, the more abusively they behave.
○ Collective moral disengagement--how bullying can be carried out not just by
individuals but, more typically, by groups of friends.
○ Gini, Pozzoli, and Bussey research results show that bullying is more likely
when students are both individually liable to use disengaged justifications
of their treatment of victims (e.g., the victim “deserved” or somehow
brought on their own suffering) and also believe that others in their
classroom commonly engage in these same justifications.
■ A significant positive relationship was found between collective
moral disengagement and defending on the part of bystanders.
■ Classroom level collective moral disengagement predicted greater
bullying and passive bystanding, whereas victim defending was
more frequent in classrooms with lower shared moral
disengagement.
○ Thornberg and Jungert found that students’ levels of moral disengagement
predicted how they responded to witnessing bullying.
■ Those who scored particularly high on moral disengagement went
beyond passive bystanding and actually were more likely to applaud
or encourage bullies.
● SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY “GOES GLOBAL”
○ Bandura has helped to produce serial dramas that encourage evidence-
based positive change behaviors for television and radio audiences to
model via observational learning.
○ These mass media productions have been shown to improve viewers’
perceived efficacy to determine their family size, increase the use of
contraceptives, and promote the status of women in family, social, and
educational life.
○ The mantra ‘think globally, act locally’ is an effort to localize the global.

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.
● THEORY RATING:
○ ABILITY TO GENERATE RESEARCH: very high.
○ FALSIFIABILITY: high.
○ ORGANIZED KNOWLEDGE: high.
○ CAN BE SERVED AS A GUIDE FOR ACTION: useful and specific.
○ INTERNALLY CONSISTENT: outstanding.
○ PARSIMONIOUS: high.
● CONCEPT OF HUMANITY:
○ Optimistic
○ Moderate both in causality and teleology
○ Social influence
■ Bandura believes that the division of biological and social factors is
a false dichotomy. Although people are limited by biological forces,
they have a remarkable plasticity.
○ Conscious
○ Free choice/Freedom
○ Uniqueness