Social Cognitive Theory

SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY

Albert Bandura

Stanford University

Bandura, A. (1989). Social cognitive theory. In R. Vasta (Ed.), Annals of child development. Vol.

6. Six theories of child development (pp. 1-60). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

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Albert Bandura Stanford University

Bandura, A. (1989). Social cognitive theory. In R. Vasta (Ed.), Annals of child development. Vol.

6. Six theories of child development (pp. 1-60). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Many theories have been proposed over the years to explain the developmental changes that people undergo over the course of their lives. These theories differ in the conceptions of human nature they adopt and in what they regard to be the basic causes and mechanisms of human motivation and behavior. The present chapter analyzes human development from the perspective of social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986). Since development is a life- long process (Baltes & Reese, 1984), the analysis is concerned with changes in the psychosocial functioning of adults as well as with those occurring in childhood. Development is not a monolithic process. Human capabilities vary in their psychobiologic origins and in the experiential conditions needed to enhance and sustain them. Human development, therefore, encompasses many different types and patterns of changes. Diversity in social practices produces substantial individual differences in the capabilities that are cultivated and those that remain underdeveloped. Triadic Reciprocal Determinism Before analyzing the development of different human capabilities, the model of causation on which social cognitive theory is founded is reviewed briefly. Human behavior has often been explained in terms of one-sided determinism. In such modes of unidirectional causation, behavior is depicted as being shaped and controlled either by environmental influences or by internal dispositions. Social cognitive theory favors a model of causation involving triadic reciprocal determinism. In this model of reciprocal causation, behavior, cognition and other personal factors, and environmental influences all operate as interacting determinants that influence each other bidirectionally (Figure 1). Reciprocal causation does not mean that the different sources of influence are of equal strength. Some may be stronger than others. Nor do

than those reputed to be unassertive. Thus, by their social status and observable characteristics people can affect their social environment before they say or do anything. The social reactions so elicited affect the recipients' conceptions of themselves and others in ways that either strengthen or alter the environmental bias (Snyder, 1981). The B ¯ E segment of reciprocal causation in the triadic system represents the two-way influence between behavior and the environment. In the transactions of everyday life, behavior alters environmental conditions and is, in turn, altered by the very conditions it creates. The environment is not a fixed entity that inevitably impinges upon individuals. When mobility is constrained, some aspects of the physical and social environment may encroach on individuals whether they like it or not. But most aspects of the environment do not operate as an influence until they are activated by appropriate behavior. Lecturers do not influence students unless they attend their classes, hot stove tops do not burn unless they are touched, parents usually do not praise their children unless they do something praiseworthy. The aspect of the potential environment that becomes the actual environment for given individuals thus depends on how they behave. Because of the bidirectionality of influence between behavior and environmental circumstances, people are both products and producers of their environment. They affect the nature of their experienced environment through selection and creation of situations. People tend to select activities and associates from the vast range of possibilities in terms of their acquired preferences and competencies (Bandura & Walters, 1959; Bullock & Merrill, 1980; Emmons & Diener, 1986). Through their actions, people create as well as select environments. Aggressive persons produce hostile environments wherever they go, whereas those who act in a more friendly manner generate an amiable social milieu (Raush, 1965). Thus, behavior determines

which of the many potential environmental influences will come into play and what forms they will take. Environmental influences, in turn, partly determine which forms of behavior are developed and activated. The growing recognition of reciprocal causation has altered the way in which socialization is viewed. One-sided developmental analyses of how parents influence their children have given way to transactional analyses of how parents and children influence each other (Bell & Harper, 1977; Cairns, 1979; Lewis & Rosenblum, 1974). Determinants of Life Paths Psychological theories of human development focus heavily on the growth of capabilities, especially during the earlier formative years when changes occur rapidly. However, the fundamental issue of what determines human life paths has received little attention. Knowledge of the level to which various capabilities have developed does not, in itself, tell us much about the course personal lives will take. When human development is viewed from a lifespan perspective, the influential determinants include a varied succession of life events that vary in their power to affect the direction lives take (Brim & Ryff, 1980; Hultsch & Plemons, 1979). Many of these determinants include age-graded social influences that are provided by custom within familial, educational, and other institutional systems. Some involve biological conditions that exercise influence over person's futures. Others are unpredicatable occurrences in the physical environment. Still others involve irregular life events such as career changes, divorce, migration, accidents, and illness. Social and technological changes alter, often considerably, the kinds of life events that become customary in the society. Indeed, many of the major changes in social and economic life are ushered in by innovations of technology. Life experiences under the same sociocultural conditions at a given period will differ for people who encounter them at different points in their

thus fortuitously formed at a talk devoted to fortuitous determinants of life paths! As this incident illustrates, some of the most important determinants of life paths often arise through the most trivial of circumstances. Many chance encounters touch people only lightly, others leave more lasting effects, and still others thrust people into new trajectories of life. Psychology cannot foretell the occurrences of fortuitous encounters, however sophisticated its knowledge of human behavior. The unforeseeability and branching power of fortuitous influences make the specific course of lives neither easily predictable nor easily controllable. Fortuity of influence does not mean that behavior is undetermined. Fortuitous influences may be unforeseeable, but having occurred they enter as evident factors in causal chains in the same way as prearranged influences do. A science of psychology does not have much to say about the occurrence of fortuitous intersections, except that personal attributes and particular social affiliations and milieus make some types of encounters more probable than others. The everyday activities of delinquent gangs and college enrollees will bring them into fortuitous contact with different types of persons. However, psychology can provide the basis for predicting the nature, scope, and strength of the impact such encounters will have on human lives. The power of fortuitous influences to inaugurate enduring change is determined by the reciprocal influence of personal proclivities and social factors. These interactive determinants have been extensively analyzed elsewhere (Bandura, 1982b). Knowledge of the factors, whether planned or fortuitous, that can alter the course of life paths provides guides for how to foster valued futures. At the personal level, it requires cultivating the capabilities for exercising self-directedness. These include the development of competencies, self-beliefs of efficacy to exercise control, and self-regulatory capabilities for

influencing one's own motivation and actions. Such personal resources expand freedom of action, and enable people to serve as causal contributors to their own life course by selecting, influencing, and constructing their own circumstances. With such skills, people are better able to provide supports and direction for their actions, to capitalize on planned or fortuitous opportunities, to resist social traps that lead down detrimental paths, and to disengage themselves from such predicaments should they become enmeshed in them. To exercise some measure of control over one's developmental course requires, in addition to effective tools of personal agency, a great deal of social support. Social resources are especially important during formative years when preferences and personal standards are in a state of flux, and there are many conflicting sources of influence with with to contend. To surmount the obstacles and stresses encountered in the life paths people take, they need social supports to give incentive, meaning, and worth to what they do. When social ties are weak or lacking, vulnerability to deleterious fortuitous influences is increased (Bandura, 1982b). The life paths that realistically become open to individuals are also partly determined by the nature of societal opportunity structures. To the extent that societal systems provide aidful means and resources they increase people's opportunities to influence the course of their lives. In social cognitive theory, people are neither driven by inner forces nor automatically shaped and controlled by the environment. As we have already seen, they function as contributors to their own motivation, behavior, and development within a network of reciprocally interacting influences. Persons are characterized within this theoretical perspective in terms of a number of basic capabilities, to which we turn next.

To say that people base many of their actions on thought does not necessarily mean they are always objectively rational. Rationality depends on reasoning skills which are not always well developed or used effectively. Even if people know how to reason they make faulty judgments when they base their reasoning on incomplete or erroneous information, or they fail to consider the full consequences of different choices. They often misread events through cognitive biases in ways that give rise to faulty beliefs about themselves and the world around them. When they act on their misconceptions, which appear subjectively rational to them, they are viewed by others as behaving in an unreasonable or foolish manner. Moreover, people often know what they ought to do but are swayed by compelling circumstances or emotional factors to behave otherwise. Although the capacity to think vastly expands human capabilities, if put to faulty use, it can also serve as a major source of personal distress. Many human dysfunctions and torments stem from problems of thought. This is because, in their thoughts, people often dwell on painful pasts and on perturbing futures of their own invention. They burden themselves with stressful arousal through anxiety-provoking rumination. They debilitate their own efforts by self-doubting and other self-defeating ideation. They constrain and impoverish their lives through phobic thinking. They drive themselves to despondency by harsh self-evaluation and dejecting modes of thinking. And they often act on misconceptions that get them into trouble. Thought can thus be a source of human failings and distress as well as human accomplishment. Analysis of how thought enters into the determination of behavior touches on fundamental issues concerning the mind-body relationship. In social cognitive theory, thoughts are brain processes rather than separate psychic entities. The view that cognitive events are brain processes does not mean that psychological laws regarding cognitive functioning must be

reduced to neurophysiological ones. Quite the contrary. One must distinguish between cortical systems and the personal and social means by which they can be orchestrated for different purposes. Mapping the neural circuitry subserving particular skills does not explain the environmental influences that structure those skills or the functional uses to which they will be put. For example, knowing how cortical neurons function in learning does not tell one much about how best to present and organize instructional material, how to code the material to remember it, and how to motivate learners to attend to, process, and rehearse what they are learning. Nor does understanding of how the brain works provide rules on how to construct conditions to produce successful parents, teachers, students or politicians. The influences needed to produce the neural occurrences underlying complex behavior are either external to the organism or act together with cognitively generated ones. The laws of psychology tell us how to structure environmental influences and to enlist cognitive activities to achieve given purposes. To view cognitions as brain processes raises the intriguing question of how people come to be producers of thoughts that may be novel, inventive, visionary, or that take complete leave of reality, as in flights of fancy. One can get oneself to imagine several novel acts, and then choose to perform one of them. Cognitive production involves intention, creation and exercise of personal agency. The question of interest is not how mind and body act on each other as though they were separate entities, but how people can, through exercise of personal agency, bring into being cognitive or cortical productions and translate them into actions. Discrete Global Structures or Specialized Cognitive Competencies Virtually all theories of cognitive development assume that children become more skilled at abstract reasoning as they grow older. The issue in dispute concerns the nature of cognitive development. According to Piagetian theory, thinking changes in an invariant stage sequence

children think about different matters. Indeed, children's intellectual self-development would be stunted if they could not draw on this heritage of knowledge in each realm of functioning and, instead, had to rediscover it, bit by bit, through their own trial-and-error activity. Guided instruction and modeling that effectively conveys abstract rules of reasoning promote cognitive development in children (Bandura, 1986; Brainerd, 1978; Rosenthal & Zimmerman, 1978). Socially-guided learning also encourages self-directed learning by providing children with the conceptual tools needed to gain new knowledge and to deal intelligently with the varied situations they encounter in their everyday life. With increasing age, human judgment and problem solving depends more heavily on specialized knowledge domains. In efforts to develop their cognitive competencies, people draw on their own experiences and turn to others who are well informed on the matters of concern. Because of the complexity and rapid growth of knowledge, human acquisition of specialized cognitive competencies relies increasingly on modeled expertise. In this process, the knowledge and reasoning strategies for sound judgment are gleaned from those who are highly knowledgeable and skilled in the relevant domain of activity. Development of cognitive competencies can be accelerated by symbolically modeling the reasoning strategies for particular domains in systematic and highly informative ways (Coombs, 1984). Language Development A great deal of human thought is linguistically based. Hence, the processes by which language develops are of major interest. Initially, children acquire knowledge about objects and about the relationships between them through nonlinguistic processing of direct and vicarious experience. Such understanding helps to impart meaning to linguistic symbols. By relating the utterances they hear to what they understand to be going on at the time, children begin to grasp

what the different linguistic forms signify (Bowerman, 1973; Macnamara, 1972). The establishment of the linguistic system creates an intricate bidirectional influence between cognitive development and language acquisition (Schlesinger, 1982). After children learn the names for things and how to represent conceptual relationships in words, language can influence how children perceive, organize, and interpret events. Language thus becomes not only a means of communication but also shapes the form of thought. The rules for encoding semantic relations in words are originally learned from discourses regarding concrete events of high interest and meaning to children. As they master linguistic competencies, language becomes more abstract and is no longer dependent on the co-occurrence of actual events. This greatly extends the power of language as a tool of thought. Generative language is unique to humans. Chimpanzees can be taught signs representing objects and be prompted to string a few of them together in a loose order, but this rudimentary communication bears little resemblance to the generative characteristics of human speech. People are endowed with information-processing capacities for extracting linguistic rules and using them to encode and convey information. The inherent capability to categorize, to abstract general characteristics from particular instances, to generalize across features of similarity, and to discriminate by features of dissimilarity provides the basic apparatus for discerning the regularities in language. These basic perceptual facilities aid recognition of similarities and differences in speech sounds and in segmenting the flow of speech into recognizable units (Jusczyk, 1981). Language is the product of multiple determinants operating through a number of mediating processes. One set of determinants concerns the cognitive skills that children need to process linguistic information. This requires capabilities to perceive the essential elements of

speech they hear around them. Once they acquire syntactic rules they can generate new sentences they have never heard. In learning to communicate symbolically, children must acquire appropriate verbal symbols for objects and events and syntactic rules for representing relationships among them. The process of acquiring language involves not only learning grammatical relations between words, but also correlating the linguistic forms with the events to which they apply. This requires integrating two relational systems--linguistic and perceptual-- both relying on a common base of understanding. Language learning, therefore, depends extensively on nonlinguistic understanding of the events to which the utterances refer. For this reason, it is difficult to transmit linguistic forms that children do not already know by verbal modeling alone. Adults, of course, do not converse abstractly with young children who have a poor grasp of speech. Verbal expressions that convey grammatical relations are usually matched to meaningful ongoing activities about which children already have some knowledge. Grammatical features of speech are more informative and distinguishable when the semantic referents to the utterances are present than when they are absent. Young children, for example, are helped to comprehend plural forms if they hear singular and plural labels applied to single and multiple objects, respectively. Acquisition of language rules is greatly facilitated by linking linguistic modeling to ongoing activities to which the speech refers (Brown, 1976; Stewart & Hamilton, 1976; Whitehurst, 1977). Seeing things happen provides informative cues to the meaning of accompanying utterances. The rate of language acquisition is affected by the complexity of the model's language relative to the children's cognitive capabilities. Children can gain little from modeled speech that exceeds their ability to process what they hear. Linguistic rules must be initially modeled in

simplified, as well as in semantically enriched forms to make them more easily learnable. Indeed, parents usually adjust their speech to their children's linguistic competence in an effort to facilitate language acquisition. When addressing young children, parents use utterances that are shorter, more repetitive, and grammatically simpler, than when they speak to older children (Baldwin & Baldwin, 1973; Moerk, 1986; Snow, 1972). Parents also speak slower, which eases the processing of linguistic input, and they use exaggerated intonation as an attention-focusing device. The linguistic environment, of course, is not populated solely with adults. Young children frequently model the language of their peers (Hamilton & Stewart, 1977). Even young children simplify their speech when they are talking to younger children (Shatz & Gelman, 1973). Children master words and linguistic forms at a very early age if provided with enriched language stimulation that matches their cognitive level (Swenson, 1983). Parents use other modeling devices to promote language development. One method is to expand their children's previous utterances by replacing deletions or adding more complex linguistic elements. Through this process, young children pick up new linguistic forms from the modeled expansions and use them in their own speech (Bloom, Hood, & Lightbown, 1974; Kemp & Dale, 1973; Nicolich & Raph, 1978). The more parents engage in reciprocal modeling, which enhances it social function, the more readily children adopt their parents' modeled expansions (Folger & Chapman, 1978). Children's utterances represent efforts to communicate about meaningful activities that command their attention. Perhaps because of the greater attentional involvement of the children, parental linguistic modeling, which expands children's utterances, increases their spontaneous use of the selected linguistic forms more effectively than does similar parental modeling that is not linked to children's prior speech (Hovell, Schumaker, & Sherman, 1978). Another form of linguistic modeling that accelerates language acquisition

benefits which function as incentives for acquiring communicative competence. In the initial prelinguistic phase, vocal expressions mainly serve interpersonal purposes--it is an effective way for infants to maintain positive interactions. When adults repeat the infants' vocal expressions, the infants' rate of spontaneous vocalizations increases substantially (Haugan & McIntire, 1972). Experience with this type of verbal interplay can enhance the infants' responsiveness to parental linguistic modeling for later language acquisition. As children begin to recognize the communicative function of speech, their expressive language is influenced by different modes of feedback. We have already seen how language skills can be improved by elaborative and corrective modeling in adult response to incomplete or ungrammatical utterances by children. If children possess sufficient linguistic knowledge, even signs of noncomprehension by adults lead children to correct their own speech in the direction of more accurate forms of language (Kasermann & Foppa, 1981). Children's language is affected more strongly by its natural consequences than by arbitrary, extrinsic ones. The most effective natural consequences are the benefits derived from influencing the social environment. Success in getting others to do things that bring one different benefits is better achieved by grammatical speech than by unintelligible utterances. The demands for communicative accuracy, although minimal initially, increase as children grow older. Changes in children's expressive language have been studied when elaborated forms of speech are made highly useful in securing valued outcomes (Hart & Risley, 1978). In these naturalistic studies, young children with limited language skills can get attractive things they want, or assistance with tasks, provided they ask for things in informative ways using appropriate sentence structures. If they do not know the speech forms, they are initially modeled for them in the context of the requests for assistance, whereupon they are encouraged to use the

elaborated speech forms. Children readily adopt advanced speech forms when they can get what they want that way. Moreover, they generalize these elaborated styles of speech across settings, occasions, activities, and people, and they continue to use them after conditions have changed so that simpler speech would do (Hart & Risley, 1975; 1980). Hart and Risley attribute the effectiveness of this motivational system to the fact that language is developed through natural interactions initiated by the children relating to activities that arouse their interest and provide strong incentives to improve their communicative skills. They receive modeled guidance if needed. These are the optimal conditions for learning. Children use language to gain needed information about things, as well as to gain access to them. Their interest in information grows as they begin to perceive relationships between environmental events and between their actions and outcomes. It is not long before they learn that knowledge which enables them to predict and control events can be very useful. Transmission of information about the workings of the environment requires elaborated language to represent the events of interest. This provides additional incentive for children to enlarge their communicative skills, so they can ask about things and understand what people tell them. They also find language useful in guiding their actions, and in explaining their own behavior to themselves and to others. This can make a big difference in how others treat them. The consequences of verbally-guided action further underscore the many benefits of linguistic competencies. Acting on misunderstandings of what other people say can have adverse effects, as can miscommunications that lead others astray. The outcomes of actions create informative feedback for improving one's understanding and use of speech.

Social Cognitive Theory, Lecture notes of Social Theory

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SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY