SL Psychology/Cognition and modeling

Social Learning Theory

Social Learning Theory is learning through the medium of a social context. Its overall premise is that people learn from one and other through such tools as observational learning, imitation, and modeling. There are four overall principles to social learning:

1. People learn by observation of others, being that a subject observes another's behavior and witnesses that behavior's outcome.

2. Learning may or may not result in a behavioral change. Social theorists say people may learn through observation alone, but of their execution of the task may not demonstrate learned behavior.

3. Cognition plays an important role, overall humans have shown that awareness and expectation of certain outcome severely influences behavior.

4. The social learning theory can be seen as a link between behaviorist learning theories and cognitive learning theories.

Albert Bandura and Modeling

Bandura's experiments dealing with the concept of modeling revolves around his work with Bobo dolls. He displayed a video to Pre-age children where an adult beat up on a doll, called it mean names, and displayed hostile behavior. For the next step, Bandura split the children into groups, and each group watched a video with a different outcome for the aggressive behavior. One video showed the adult being rewarded for his behavior, the second the subject being punished, and the third video showed no consequences. He then studied the differences between how male children and female children reacted to this video in regard to whether they imitated the observed behavior or not. In conclusion, males in all cases imitated the observed adults behavior more so than females. The results support that the children who watched the video in which the person was rewarded for his actions repeated the behaviors more so than when the person was punished or did not receive either a punishment or reward. Overall this experiment supports Bandura's theory that people learn by observing others.

Essay Topic

Describe the bidirectional approach between nature and environment on learning.

Bibliography

Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S.A. (1961). Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575-582.