Behavioral Theory: B.F. Skinner

Unit 3 Chapter 11 Part 3 Behavioral Theory: B.F. Skinner Learned Responses/Habits: automatic well-learned responses Social Cognitive Learning Theorists: importance of influences of other people’s behavior and of own expectancies on learning (external stimuli and response patterns) Albert Bandura Social Cognitive View: cognitive processes such as anticipating, judging, memory, and imitation of models ● Reciprocal Dterminism: factors of environment, personal characteristics, and behavior can interact to determine future behavior (interchangeable influences) ○ Ex. Environment of no teacher present. Personal Characteristic would be telling a joke due to being rewarded in the past which will have expectancies of future rewards and gain more attention. Behavior will tell jokes if he gets the expected reaction from the students. If the environment changes and the teacher come in, his behavior will change, and the students won’t laugh. In the future, less likely to behave the same way because the expectations for reward are different (personal variable) ● Self-Efficacy: individual’s expectancy of how effective efforts to accomplish a goal will be in any particular circumstance ○ Can be high or low depending on what has happened in a similar circumstance in the past (success or failure), what other people tell them about their competence, and own assessment of their abilities ○ Ex. Higher sell-efficacy: more likely to write extra-credit paper if has gotten good grades on papers in the past, teacher says she writes well, and knows she can write a good paper (more persistent and expect to succeed) Julian Rotter’s Locus of Control: people to assume that they either have or don’t have control over events and consequences in their life ● Personality is a relatively stable set of potential responses in various situations ● Internal: assume their own actions and decisions directly affect the consequences they experience ○ Personality characteristics of high achievement motivation and succeed ○ Ex. Appreciates compliments about her business but values constructive criticism so she can address particular issues ● External: assume their lives are controlled by powerful others, luck, or fate ○ Give up too quickly or who attribute their lives to external causes can fall into patterns of learned helplessness and depression Expectancy: person’s subjective feeling that a particular behavior will lead to a reinforcing consequence ● High Expectancy is like a high sense of self-efficacy: based on past experiences with successes and failures ● Reinforcement Value: individual’s preference for a particular reinforcer over all other possible reinforcing consequences. Circumstances/things that are more appealing has higher reinforcement value than other possible reinforcers Behaviorism Views Now ● Formation of personality has its limitations, doesn’t take mental processes into account when explaining behavior or give weight to social influences on learning ● Human personality and behavior are too complex to explain as a result of cognitions and external stimuli interacting ● Enabled development of therapies based on learning theory that are effective in changing undesirable behavior, but overgeneralization may lead to some errors ○ Ex. External Locus of control: May endorse due to particular life experiences like females of low socioeconomic status or ethnic minority as the experience of control over their lives aren't the same from other groups