Social Learning Theory

Social Learning Theory

1. Bandura and Walters - direct experience is responsible for learning new behaviours

   • Observation: children primarily learn their responses through observation, watching the role of models and imitating their behaviour. Like operant conditioning, children learn through seeing others being punished/rewarded (aka vicarious reinforcement). E.g. television, school,etc. Children learn the consequences, and learn if the behaviour is considered appropriate (and effective) in the world around them. Thus, they learn the behaviours (through observation), also learn when such behaviours are worth repeating (through vicarious reinforcement).
   • Mental Representation: for social learning to take place, children must form mental representations of events in their social environment. Must represent possible rewards and punishments for for their aggressive behaviour in terms of expectancies of future outcomes. When appropriate opportunities arise in the future, the child will display the learned behaviour if expectation of reward > expectation of punishment.
   • Production of behaviour
     • Maintenance through direct experience: If a child is rewarded for a behaviour, they are likely to repeat the same action in future similar situations. A child with a history of successfully bullying other children will therefore come to attach considerable value to aggression.
     • Self-efficacy experiences: Children develop confidence in their ability to carry out the necessary aggressive actions. If children were not very good at this in the past, have lower self-efficacy in their ability to use aggression to solve conflicts, and therefore may turn to other means.

2. Research support

   • The role of punishment: The punishment may have prevented those in group 2 from performing the behaviour, rather than from learning the behaviour. Bandura gave the children rewards if they repeated the model's aggressive behaviour. All three groups then performed a similar number of imitative acts, showing that learning does take place, regardless of reinforcements but that production of behaviours is related to selective reinforcements.
   • Applicability to adults: Phillips found that daily homicide rates in US almost always increased in the week following a major boxing match, showing that viewers were imitating the behaviour they watched, and that SL is evident in adults and children.

3. Strengths of SLT

   • The role of vicarious learning: Unlike operant conditioning, it explains aggression in the absence of direct reinforcement. Although Bandura's ppts behaved more aggressively after observing an aggressive model, the children were not directly rewarded for their behaviour. This shows how vicarious learning is key to explaining these findings.
   • Individual differences in aggression: explains differences in aggression both between and within individuals. Wolfgang and Ferracuti's 'culture of violence' theory proposes in large societies, subcultures develop norms that sanction violence to a greater degree than a dominant culture, producing individuals that show low levels of aggression. Differences within individuals relate to selective reinforcement and context-dependent learning. People respond differently in different situations - they observe that aggression is rewarded in some situations and not others (eg they learn behaviours for different contexts).