Social Cognitive Theory

Social Cognitive Theory

• Social-Cognitive Perspective is a branch of psychology that focuses on intelligence and thought processes, emphasizing the dynamic interaction between people, their behavior, and their environment.
• It explores the internal mental processes underlying human learning and behavior.

Social-Cognitive Perspective on Personality

• Proposed by Albert Bandura, this perspective views behavior as influenced by the interaction between people's traits (including their thinking) and their social context.
• We learn many of our behaviors through social and cognitive parts:
  • Social part: through conditioning, observing others, and modeling behaviors after theirs.
  • Cognitive part: mental processes affect our behaviors, and what we think about our situations affects our behaviors.

Reciprocal Determinism

• Each person has a unique personality due to their personal histories and interpretation of the world around them, which shapes their personalities.
• Reciprocal determinism, as proposed by Bandura, views the person-environment interaction as interlocking determinants of each other, where behavior, internal personal factors, and environmental influences all operate together.

Self-Efficacy

• Self-efficacy is the level of a person's confidence in their ability to successfully perform a behavior.
• It is based on past experiences and beliefs, and affects personal capability assessment.

Personal Control

• Social cognitive psychologists emphasize the importance of our sense of personal control, whether we learn to see ourselves controlling or being controlled by our environment.
• Personal control is the extent to which people perceive control over their environment, rather than feeling helpless.
• Internal locus of control: the perception that you control your own fate, positively correlated with self-esteem.
• External locus of control: the perception that chance or outside forces beyond your personal control determine your fate.

Learned Helplessness

• People who repeatedly face traumatic events over which they have no control come to feel helpless, hopeless, and depressed.
• Learned helplessness is the hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events.