The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach PDF

3 13 The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach Theory, Application, and Assessment Behaviorism Basic Principles of Conditioning Social Learning Theory Social-Cognitive Theory Application: Conditioning Principles and Self-Efficacy in Psychotherapy Assessment: Behavior Observation Methods Strengths and...

3 13 The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach Theory, Application, and Assessment Behaviorism Basic Principles of Conditioning Social Learning Theory Social-Cognitive Theory Application: Conditioning Principles and Self-Efficacy in Psychotherapy Assessment: Behavior Observation Methods Strengths and Criticisms of the Behavioral/Social Learning Approach DNY59/E+/Getty Images Summary Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Behaviorism 311 I f you ever run across an introductory psychology text in a used book store—say, one published several decades ago—you might want to turn to the opening chapter and read the definition of “psychology.” Most likely, you will find psychology is “the study of behavior.” That’s it. Just behavior. No mention of thoughts or emotions or any of the other topics that are central to the discipline today. This old definition reflects the influence behaviorism once had over our field, so much so that it severely restricted the scope of psychological inquiry. As the name implies, behaviorism made behavior the primary focus of psychology. Although behaviorism’s influence has diminished over the last half century or so, this does not mean that the contributions made by behaviorists were wrong or have been replaced. More accurately, the discipline has grown, and the basic concepts that made up the earlier behavioral approach have been built upon and expanded. Initially, behaviorists limited their descriptions to observable behaviors. Later, social learning theory expanded the scope of the approach to include unobservable concepts like thoughts, values, expectancies, and individual perceptions. Social learning psychologists also recognized that people can learn simply by watching someone else or even hearing about another person’s behavior. In the past few decades, many behavioral psychologists have moved toward invoking cognitive concepts into their explanations of behavior, so much so that today the line between behavioral and cognitive approaches to personality is sometimes blurred. Practitioners who once wore the label “behavioral therapists” now refer to themselves as “cognitive-behavioral therapists.” As we will see, both traditional behaviorism—presented next—and the ­cognitive approaches to personality described in Chapter 15 have a lot to tell us about the causes of personality and avenues for change. Behaviorism I n 1913, a young and brash psychologist named John B. Watson published an article titled “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” This article signaled the beginning of a new movement in psychology called behaviorism. By 1924, with the publication of his book Behaviorism, Watson had made significant progress in his effort to redefine the discipline. He argued that if psychology is to be a science, psychologists must stop examining mental states. Only the observable was reasonable subject matter for a science, and because subjective inner states and feelings cannot be observed or measured in an agreed-upon, accurate manner, they have no place in psychology. The sooner psychology abandons these topics, Watson maintained, the sooner it can become a respectable member of the scientific community. What, then, was the appropriate subject matter for psychology? Watson’s answer was overt behavior—that which can be observed, predicted, and eventually controlled by scientists. We should take a moment to appreciate just how much of psychology Watson was ready to jettison in his quest. Emotions, thoughts, expectancies, values, reasoning, insight, the unconscious, and the like were of interest to behaviorists only if they could be defined in terms of observable behaviors. At about the same time, other researchers were beginning to study the basic processes of conditioning, or learning. Like Watson, these investigators focused Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. George Rinhart/Corbis Historical/Getty Images John B. Watson 1878–1958 As a child growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, John Broadus Watson exhibited two characteristics that would later come to define his career—he was a fighter and he was a builder. He once wrote that his favorite activity in elementary school was fighting with classmates “until one or the other drew blood.” But by age 12 he had also become something of a master carpenter. Later, during his first few years as a psychology professor, he built his own 10-room house virtually by himself. Watson’s lack of enthusiasm for contemporary standards also surfaced early. In grammar school, “I was lazy, somewhat insubordinate, and, so far as I know, I never made above a passing grade.” He also found that “little of my college life interested me. … I was unsocial and had few close friends” (1936, p. 271). Watson bragged about being the only student to pass the Greek exam his senior year at Furman University. His secret was to cram the entire day before the test, powered only by a quart of Coca-Cola. “Today,” he reported years later, “I couldn’t to save my life write the Greek alphabet or conjugate a verb” (1936, p. 272). Watson began his doctoral work in philosophy at the University of Chicago (in part because Princeton required a reading knowledge of Greek). He soon switched to psychology, where, unlike his classmates, he preferred working with rats instead of humans. “Can’t I find out by watching their behavior,” he asked, “everything the other students are finding out?” (1936, p. 276). Watson joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 1908, where he began his quest to replace the psychology of the day with his new behavioral approach. His views received a surprisingly warm welcome from many scholars and academics, and in 1912, he was invited to give a series of public lectures on his theory at Columbia University. He publ i s h e d a n i n f l u e n t i a l p a p e r, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” in 1913 and his first book in 1914. Soon behaviorism swept over the discipline. Watson was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1915. Watson the fighter had taken on contemporary psychology and won, whereas Watson the builder had constructed an approach to understanding human behavior that would change the discipline for decades to come. But his academic career was cut short in 1920. Watson suddenly divorced his wife of 17 years and married Rosalie Rayner, the research assistant with whom he had conducted the Little Albert experiments. The scandal that surrounded these actions forced Watson out of an intolerant Johns Hopkins and into the business world, where he eventually settled into a successful career in advertising. After writing a few popular articles and a book in 1925, Watson severed his ties with psychology while still in his late 40s. Several decades later, the foundation he built for the behavioral approach to personality still stands. their efforts on predicting overt behaviors without introducing inner mental states to explain their findings. The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov demonstrated that animals could be made to respond to stimuli in their environment by pairing these stimuli with events that already elicited a response, a process that became known as classical conditioning. Other psychologists were exploring what we know today as 312 Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Behaviorism “If I am right about human behavior, an individual is only the way in which a species and a culture produce more of a species and a culture.” B. F. Skinner 313 ­operant conditioning. For example, Edward Thorndike found that animals were less likely to repeat behaviors that met with negative consequences than were animals given no punishment. This work convinced Watson that a few key conditioning principles would suffice to explain almost any human behavior. Personality was “the end product of our habit systems.” In other words, over the course of our lives we are conditioned to respond to certain stimuli in more or less predictable ways. You might have been conditioned by parents and teachers to respond to challenges with increased effort. Someone else might have learned to give up or try something new. Because each of us has a unique history of experiences that shaped our characteristic responses to stimuli, each adult has a slightly different personality. Watson had tremendous faith in the power of conditioning. His most outrageous claim, which he admitted went “beyond my facts,” was that given enough control over the environment, psychologists could mold a child into whatever kind of adult they wanted. “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in,” he wrote. “I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, ­merchant—chief, and yes, even beggarman and thief” (1924/1970, p. 104). This he promised regardless of the child’s inherited abilities, intelligence, or ancestry. Although somewhat frightening in its implications for controlling human behavior, this type of thinking found a receptive audience among Americans who believed in the tradition of equal opportunity for all regardless of background or social class. Watson’s legacy was extended by the career of another influential psychologist, B. F. Skinner. Skinner, who identified his approach as radical behaviorism, took a small step away from the more extreme position Watson advocated. He did not deny the existence of thoughts and inner experiences. Rather, Skinner challenged the extent to which we can observe the inner causes of our behavior. Suppose you are typically uncomfortable at social events. As you prepare for a party one evening, you begin to feel nervous. It’s going to be a big party, and you don’t think you will know very many people. At the last minute, your anxiety becomes intense and you decide to stay home. Why did you skip the party? Most people would answer that they avoided the party because they felt anxious. But Skinner (1974) argued that behavior does not change because you feel anxious. Rather, in this example, the decision to skip the party and the anxiety are both conditioned reactions to the situation. In other words, when we introduce an inner cause like anxiety to explain our actions, we may think we have identified the cause of the behavior, but we are mistaken. When you say you began eating because you were hungry, you have only put a label on your behavior. You have not explained why you are eating. Similarly, saying that people behave the way they do because they are friendly or aggressive or introverted does not explain where these behaviors come from. Although radically different in many ways, Skinner’s view is much like Freud’s in one respect. Both maintained that people simply do not know the reason for many of their behaviors, although we often think we do. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Bettmann/Getty Images B. F. Skinner 1904–1990 When Burrhus Frederick Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, his father, a lawyer, announced the birth in the local paper: “The town has a new law firm: Wm. A. Skinner & Son.” But all the father’s efforts to shape his son into a legal career failed. After growing up in a “warm and stable” home, Skinner went to Hamilton College to study English. He planned a career as a professional writer, not a lawyer. This ambition was reinforced the summer before his senior year when an instructor introduced Skinner to the poet Robert Frost. Frost asked to see some of Skinner’s work. Skinner sent three short stories, and several months later he received a letter from Frost encouraging him to continue writing. Skinner devoted the two years after his graduation to writing, first at home and later in Greenwich Village in New York. At the end of this time, he realized he had produced nothing and was not likely to become a great novelist. “I was to remain interested in human behavior, but the literary method had failed me,” he wrote. “I would turn to the scientific. The relevant science appeared to be psychology, though I had only the vaguest idea of what that meant” (1967, p. 395). And so Skinner went to ­Harvard to learn about psychology. He immersed himself in his studies, rising at 6 o’clock each morning to hit the books. After teaching at the University of Minnesota and Indiana University, Skinner returned to Harvard in 1948, where he remained the rest of his career. Literature’s loss was psychology’s gain. A survey of psychology historians taken just before his death ranked Skinner as the most influential of all contemporary psychologists (Korn, Davis, & Davis, 1991). Although his work in psychology earned him numerous professional awards and recognitions, Skinner never relinquished his interest in literature. In the 1940s, he returned to fiction, writing a novel, Walden Two, about a utopian society based on the principles of reinforcement he had found in his laboratory experiments. “It was pretty obviously a venture in self-therapy,” Skinner wrote, sounding more psychoanalytic than behavioristic. “I was struggling to reconcile two aspects of my own behavior represented by [the characters] ­Burris and Frazier” (1967, p. 403). As this statement suggests, Skinner was not always as anti-Freudian as he is often described. Indeed, early in his career, he developed what he described as a projective test based on vague sounds emitted by a phonograph and once sought out an opportunity to go through psychoanalysis himself (Overskeid, 2007). Nonetheless, Skinner remained an adamant believer in the power of environmental contingencies and eventually became an unwavering critic of those who introduce unobservable concepts to explain human behavior. “I do not believe that my life shows a type of personality à la Freud, an archetypal pattern à la Jung, or a schedule of development à la Erikson,” Skinner wrote nearly eight decades after his birth. “There have been a few abiding themes, but they can be traced to environmental sources rather than to traits of character. They became part of my life as I lived it; they were not there at the beginning to determine its course” (1983, p. 401). Perhaps not surprisingly, Skinner’s theory and some of the implications derived from it are controversial. Skinner described happiness as “a by-product of operant reinforcement.” The things that bring happiness are the ones that reinforce us. In his most controversial work, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner (1971) argued that it is time we moved beyond the illusion of personal freedom and the so-called dignity we 314 Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Basic Principles of Conditioning 315 award ourselves for our actions. We don’t freely choose to do something as the result of inner moral decisions; we simply respond to environmental demands. We attribute dignity to people for admirable behavior, but because behavior is under the control of external contingencies, dignity is also an illusion. If you rush into a burning building to save people, it is not because you are heroic or foolish but because you have a ­history of reinforcement in similar situations. Basic Principles of Conditioning T raditional behaviorists explain the causes of behavior in terms of learning experiences, or conditioning. They do not deny the influence of genetics but downplay its importance relative to the power of conditioning. To understand the processes that shape our personalities, we must examine basic conditioning principles. It is convenient to divide conditioning into two categories: classical (or Pavlovian) conditioning and operant (or instrumental) conditioning. Classical Conditioning Classical conditioning begins with an existing stimulus-response (S-R) association. For example, some people cringe (response) whenever they see a spider (stimulus). Although you may not be aware of them, your behavior repertoire contains a large number of S-R associations. You might feel faint when you see blood, want to eat whenever you smell chocolate, or become nervous when you find yourself more than a few feet off the ground. In his classic demonstration of conditioning, Pavlov used the S-R association of food and salivation. He presented hungry dogs in his laboratory with meat powder (stimulus), to which they would always salivate (response). Because this S-R association existed without any conditioning from Pavlov, we call the meat powder the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) and the salivation the unconditioned response (UCR). Then Pavlov paired the old, unconditioned stimulus with a new, conditioned stimulus (CS). Whenever he presented the meat powder to the dogs, he also sounded a bell. After several trials of presenting the meat powder and the bell together, Pavlov simply sounded the bell without the powder. What happened? As nearly every psychology student knows, the dogs began to salivate at the sound of the bell, even though no meat powder had been presented. The salivation had become the conditioned response (CR), part of a new S-R association (bell tone-salivation) in the dogs’ behavioral repertoire. The classical conditioning procedure is diagramed in Figure 13.1. Once the new S-R association is established, it can be used to condition still another S-R association. If you were to pair a green light with Pavlov’s bell tone, after a while the dogs would start to salivate when the green light came on. This process of building one conditioned S-R association on another is called second-order conditioning. Because the stimuli we experience are often inadvertently paired with other aspects of our environment, we are not aware of all the many S-R associations that influence our behavior. Research suggests that our preferences in food, clothing, and even friends may have been determined through classical conditioning. Participants in one study were made anxious and then asked to sit in a waiting room with a stranger Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 316 Chapter 13 / The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS) Unconditioned Response (UCR) Conditioned Stimulus (CS) Conditioned Response (CR) Figure 13.1 Classical Conditioning Diagram (Riordan & Tedeschi, 1983). Although the two did not interact, participants reported unfavorable impressions of this other person. The researchers reasoned that the incidental pairing of the anxiety with the stranger created a negative association with that person. However, researchers have also uncovered several limitations of classical conditioning. For a new S-R association to persist, the unconditioned and conditioned stimuli must be paired occasionally or otherwise reinforced. When Pavlov presented his conditioned dogs with just the bell tone, the dogs salivated less and less until finally the dogs failed to salivate to the tone at all. This gradual disappearance of the conditioned S-R association is called extinction. Moreover, two events presented together will not always produce an association (Rescorla, 1988). Certain stimuli are easily associable, but it may be impossible to create some S-R bonds through classical conditioning. Operant Conditioning “Happiness is a … by-product of operant reinforcement. The things which make us happy are the things which reinforce us.” B. F. Skinner At about the time Pavlov was demonstrating classical conditioning in Russia; ­American psychologists were investigating another type of learning through association. Edward Thorndike put stray cats into “puzzle boxes.” To escape from the box and thereby obtain a piece of fish, the hungry cats had to engage in a particular combination of actions. Before long, the cats learned what they had to do to receive their reward. These observations helped Thorndike (1911) formulate the law of effect: that behaviors are more likely to be repeated if they lead to satisfying consequences and less likely to be repeated if they lead to unsatisfying consequences. Thorndike’s cats repeated the required behaviors because their actions led to the satisfying consequences of escape and food. At first glance, Thorndike’s observations hardly seem insightful. Do you know any parents who don’t occasionally try rewards and punishments to change the way their children act? Teachers, judges, and employers also regularly rely on the connection between actions and consequences to shape behavior. But vague feelings that such a connection exists are not the same as understanding how this learning works or the Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Basic Principles of Conditioning 317 Jerry Burger/Santa Clara University most efficient and productive way to use it. Ask a group of parents the best way to deal with a problem child, and you will soon understand how little agreement there is among nonscientists on how to use rewards and punishments. This poor understanding of basic learning principles is unfortunate, given the power of conditioning processes. It is especially tragic because several decades of research have provided psychologists with a relatively good understanding of how reinforcement and punishment shape and control behavior. Unlike classical conditioning, which begins with an existing S-R bond, operant conditioning begins with behaviors the organism (human or lower animal) emits spontaneously. We can observe these operant behaviors when a laboratory rat is placed in a new cage. The animal moves about, scratches, sniffs, and claws in a haphazard manner, for none of these responses have been reinforced or punished. Operant conditioning concerns the effect certain kinds of consequences have on the frequency of behavior. A consequence that increases the frequency of a behavior that precedes it is called a reinforcement, and one that decreases the behavior is called a punishment. Whether a consequence is reinforcing or punishing varies according to the person and the situation. If you are hungry, strawberry ice cream is probably a reinforcement. But if you don’t like strawberry ice cream or if you are cold, the ice cream may serve as a punishment. Psychologists have discovered two basic reinforcement strategies for increasing the frequency of a behavior (Table 13.1). With positive reinforcement, the behavior Much of what we know about the basic principles of conditioning was first demonstrated with laboratory animals. Here a researcher uses operant conditioning to teach a rat to press a bar. The rat receives positive reinforcement (a pellet of food) whenever it presses the bar. Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.