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PSYC 1073 COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Social Learning Theory Approach
Rotter and Mischel
LEARNING CONTENT
Rotter and Mischel
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INTRODUCTION:
The dominant perspective in clinical psychology at the time was Freud's psychoanalysis, which focused on people's
deep-seated instinctual motives as determining behavior. Individuals were seen as being naive to their unconscious impulses,
and treatment required long-term analysis of childhood experience. Even learning approaches at the time were dominated by
drive theory, which held that people are motivated by physiologically-based impulses that press the individual to satisfy them.
In developing social learning theory, Rotter departed from instinct-based psychoanalysis and drive-based behaviorism. He
believed that a psychological theory should have a psychological motivational principle. Rotter chose the empirical law of
effect as his motivating factor. The law of effect states that people are motivated to seek out positive stimulation, or
reinforcement, and to avoid unpleasant stimulation. Rotter combined behaviorism and the study of personality, without relying
on physiological instincts or drives as a motive force.
The main idea in social learning theory is that personality represents an interaction of the individual with his or her
environment. One cannot speak of a personality, internal to the individual, that is independent of the environment. Neither can
one focus on behavior as being an automatic response to an objective set of environmental stimuli. Rather, to understand
behavior, one must take both the individual (i.e., his or her life history of learning and experiences) and the environment (i.e.,
those stimuli that the person is aware of and responding to) into account. Rotter describes personality as a relatively stable
set of potentials for responding to situations in a particular way.
Rotter sees personality, and therefore behavior, as always changeable. Change the way the person thinks, or change
the environment the person is responding to, and behavior will change. He does not believe there is a critical period after
which personality is set. But, the more life experience one has building up certain sets of beliefs, the more effort and
intervention required for change to occur. Rotter conceives of people in an optimistic way. He sees them as being drawn
forward by their goals, seeking to maximize their reinforcement, rather than just avoiding punishment.
Overview of Cognitive Social Learning Theory
Rotter and Mischel believe that behavior is not shaped by environment but by one's expectations of future events are
determinants of performance (e.g. girl feels unpopular so doesn't make new friends so doesn't try to be friendly to others)
Both of them believe that cognitive factors, more than immediate reinforcements, determine how people will react to
environmental forces. Each suggests that our expectations of future events are major determinants of performance.
Biography of Julian Rotter
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Julian Rotter was born in Brooklyn in 1916. As a high-school student, he became familiar with some of the writings of Freud
and Adler, but he majored in chemistry rather than psychology while at Brooklyn College. In 1941, he received a Ph.D. in
clinical psychology from Indiana University. After World War II, he took a position at Ohio State, where one of his students was
Walter Mischel. In 1963, he moved to the University of Connecticut and has remained there since retirement.
Julian Rotter is a clinical psychologist who was influenced by Bandura’s social learning theory after rejecting a strict
behaviorist approach. Rotter expanded upon Bandura’s ideas of reciprocal determinism, and he developed the term locus of
control to describe how individuals view their relationship to the environment. Distinct from self-efficacy, which involves our
belief in our own abilities, locus of control refers to our beliefs about the power we have over our lives, and is a cognitive
factor that affects personality development. Locus of control can be classified along a spectrum from internal to external;
where an individual falls along the spectrum determines the extent to which they believe they can affect the events around
them.
Rotter's interactionist position holds that human behavior is based largely on the interaction of people with their meaningful
environments. Rotter believes that, although personality can change at any time, it has a basic unity that preserves it from
changing as a result of minor experiences. His empirical law of effect assumes that people choose a course of action that
advances them toward an anticipated goal.
Predicting Specific Behaviors. Human behavior is most accurately predicted by an understanding of four variables:
behavior potential, expectancy, reinforcement value, and the psychological situation.
Behavior potential is the possibility that a particular response will occur at a given time and place in relation to its likely
reinforcement; while People's expectancy in any given situation is their confidence that a particular reinforcement will follow a
specific behavior in a specific situation or situations. Expectancies can be either general or specific, and the overall likelihood
of success is a function of both generalized and specific expectancies.
Reinforcement value is a person's preference for any particular reinforcement over other reinforcements if all are equally
likely to occur. Internal reinforcement is the individual's perception of an event, whereas external reinforcement refers to
society's evaluation of an event. Reinforcement-reinforcement sequences suggest that the value of an event is a function of
one's expectation that a particular reinforcement will lead to future reinforcements. The psychological situation is that part
of the external and internal world to which a person is responding. Behavior is a function of the interaction of people with their
meaningful environment.
Basic Prediction Formula
Hypothetically, in any specific situation, behavior can be predicted by the basic prediction formula, which states that the
potential for a behavior to occur in a particular situation in relation to a given reinforcement is a function of people's
expectancy that the behavior will be followed by that reinforcement in that situation. For Predicting General Behaviors, the
basic prediction is too specific to give clues about how a person will generally behave.
Generalized Expectancies
To make more general predictions of behavior, one must know people's generalized expectancies, or their expectations based
on similar past experiences that a given behavior will be reinforced. Generalized expectancies include people's needs-that is,
behaviors that move them toward a goal.
Needs
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Needs refer to functionally related categories of behaviors. Rotter listed six broad categories of needs, with each need being
related to behaviors that lead to the same or similar reinforcements:
(1) recognition-status refers to the need to excel, to achieve, and to have others recognize one's worth;
(2) dominance is the need to control the behavior of others, to be in charge, or to gain power over others;
(3) independence is the need to be free from the domination of others;
(4) protection-dependency is the need to have others take care of us and to protect us from harm;
(5) love and affection are needs to be warmly accepted by others and to be held in friendly regard; and
(6) physical comfort includes those behaviors aimed at securing food, good health, and physical security.
Three need components are:
(1) need potential, or the possible occurrences of a set of functionally related behaviors directed toward the satisfaction of
similar goals;
(2) freedom of movement, or a person's overall expectation of being reinforced for performing those behaviors that are
directed toward satisfying some general need; and
(3) need value, or the extent to which people prefer one set of reinforcements to another.
Need components are analogous to the more specific concepts of behavior potential, expectancy, and reinforcement
value.
General Prediction Formula
The general prediction formula states that need potential is a function of freedom of movement and need value. Rotter's two
most famous scales for measuring generalized expectancies are the Internal-External Control Scale and the Interpersonal
Trust Scale.
Internal and External Control of Reinforcement
The Internal-External Control Scale (popularly called "locus of control scale") attempts to measure the degree to which people
perceive a causal relationship between their own efforts and environmental consequences.
"Locus of Control." For many people, their only exposure to the ideas of Julian B. Rotter is his concept of generalized
expectancies for control of reinforcement, more commonly known as locus of control. Locus of control refers to people's very
general, cross-situational beliefs about what determines whether or not they get reinforced in life. People can be classified
along a continuum from very internal to very external.
Internal Locus of Control
A person with an internal locus of control believes that their rewards in life
are guided by their own decisions and efforts. If they do not succeed, they
believe it is due to their own lack of effort. An internal locus of control has
been shown to develop along with self-regulatory abilities. People with an
internal locus of control tend to internalize both failures and successes.
Many factors have been associated with an internal locus of control. Males
tend to be more internal than females when it comes to personal
successes—a factor likely due to cultural norms that emphasize
aggressive behavior in males and submissive behavior in females. As
societal structures change, this difference may become minimized. As
External Locus of Control
A person with an external locus of control sees their life as being
controlled by luck, chance, or other people—especially others with more
power than them. If they do not succeed, they believe it is due to forces
outside their control. People with an external locus of control tend to
externalize both successes and failures. Individuals who grow up in
circumstances where they do not see hard work pay off, as well as
individuals who are socially disempowered (such as people in a low
socioeconomic bracket), may develop an external locus of control. An
external locus of control may relate to learned helplessness, a behavior in
which an organism forced to endure painful or unpleasant stimuli becomes
unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters with those stimuli,
even if they are able to escape.
Evidence has supported the theory that locus of control is learned and can
be modified. However, in a non-responsive environment, where an
individual actually does not have much control, an external locus of control
people get older, they tend to become more internal as well. This may be
due to the fact that as children, individuals do not have much control over
their lives. Additionally, people higher up in organizational structures tend
to be more internal. Rotter theorized that this trait was most closely
associated with motivation to succeed.
is associated with a greater sense of satisfaction.
Examples of locus of control can be seen in students. A student with an
internal locus of control may receive a poor grade on an exam and
conclude that they did not study enough. They realize their efforts caused
the grade and that they will have to try harder next time. A student with an
external locus of control who does poorly on an exam might conclude that
the test was poorly written and the teacher was incompetent, thereby
blaming external factors out of their control.
Interpersonal Trust Scale
The Interpersonal Trust Scale measures the extent to which a person expects the word or promise of another person to be
true. The social-cognitive theory of personality emphasizes both learning and cognition as sources of individual differences in
personality. It posits that portions of an individual’s knowledge acquisition can be directly related to observing others within the
context of social interactions, experiences, and outside media influences. This means that an individual can learn from
observing others, as opposed to only being able to learn from their own experiences. This approach emphasizes both the
environment and the individual’s own traits as important factors in personality development.
Rotter defined maladaptive behavior as any persistent behavior that fails to move a person closer to a desired goal. It is
usually the result of unrealistically high goals in combination with low ability to achieve them. (Maladaptive behavior)
In general, the goal of Rotter's therapy is to achieve harmony between the client's freedom of movement and need value. The
therapist is actively involved in trying to (1) change the importance of the client's goals and (2) eliminate their unrealistically
low expectancies for success. (Psychotherapy)
Maladaptive behaviors follow from three categories of inappropriate goals: (1) conflict between goals, (2) destructive goals,
and (3) unrealistically lofty goals. (Changing Goals)
Eliminating Low Expectancies
In helping clients change low expectancies of success, Rotter uses a variety of approaches, including reinforcing positive
behaviors, ignoring inappropriate behaviors, giving advice, modeling appropriate behaviors, and pointing out the long range
consequences of both positive and negative behaviors.
Biography of Walter Mischel
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Walter Mischel was born in 1930, in Vienna, the second son of upper-middle-class parents. When the Nazis invaded Austria
in 1938, his family moved to the United States and eventually settled in Brooklyn. Mischel received an M.A. from City College
of New York and a Ph.D. from Ohio State, where he was influenced by Julian Rotter. He is currently a professor at Columbia
University.
Introduction to Mischel's Cognitive-Affective Personality System
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Like Bandura and Rotter, Mischel believes that cognitive factors, such as expectancies, subjective perceptions, values, goals,
and personal standards, are important in shaping personality. In his early theory, Mischel seriously questioned the consistency
of personality, but more recently, he and Yuichi Shoda have advanced the notion that behavior is also a function of relatively
stable personal dispositions and cognitive-affective processes interacting with a particular situation.
Background of the Cognitive-Affective Personality System
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Mischel originally believed that human behavior was mostly a function of the situation, but presently he has recognized the
importance of relatively permanent cognitive-affective units. Nevertheless, Mischel's theory continues to recognize the
apparent inconsistency of some behaviors.
Consistency Paradox. The consistency paradox refers to the observation that, although both lay-people and professionals
tend to believe that behavior is quite consistent, research suggests that it is not. Mischel recognizes that, indeed, some traits
are consistent over time, but he contends that there is little evidence to suggest that they are consistent from one situation to
another.
Person-Situation Interaction. Mischel believes that behavior is best predicted from an understanding of the person, the
situation, and the interaction between person and situation. Thus, behavior is not the result of some global personality trait,
but by people's perceptions of themselves in a particular situation.
Cognitive-Affective Personality System
However, Mischel does not believe that inconsistencies in behavior are due solely to the situation; he recognizes that
inconsistent behaviors reflect stable patterns of variation within a person. He and Shoda see these stable variations in
behavior in the following framework: If A, then X; but if B, then Y. People's pattern of variability is their behavioral signature of
personality, or their unique and stable pattern of behaving differently in different situations.
Behavior Prediction
Mischel's basic theoretical position for predicting and explaining behavior is as follows: If personality is a stable system that
processes information about the situation, then individuals encountering different situations should behave differently as
situations vary. Therefore, Mischel believes that, even though people's behavior may reflect some stability over time, it tends
to vary as situations vary. Situation variables include all those stimuli that people attend to in a given situation.
Cognitive-affective units include all those psychological, social, and physiological aspects of people that permit them to
interact with their environment with some stability in their behavior. Mischel identified five such units. First are encoding
strategies, or people's individualized manner of categorizing information they receive from external stimuli. Second are
competencies and self-regulatory strategies. One of the most important of these competencies is intelligence, which Mischel
argues is responsible for the apparent consistency of other traits. In addition, people use self-regulatory strategies to control
their own behavior through self-formulated goals and self-produced consequences. The third cognitive affective units are
expectancies and beliefs, or people's guesses about the consequences of each of the different behavioral possibilities. The
fourth cognitive-affective unit includes people's goals and values, which tend to render behavior fairly consistent. Mischel's
fifth cognitive-affective unit includes affective responses, including emotions, feelings, and the affects that accompany
physiological reactions.
Related Research
The theories of both Rotter and Mischel have sparked an abundance of related research, with Rotter's locus of control being
one of the most frequently researched areas in psychology and Mischel's notion of delay of gratification and his cognitiveaffective personality system also receiving wide attention.
Locus of Control and Health-Related Behaviors
One adjunct of the locus of control concept is the health locus of control, and research in this area suggests that self-mastery
of health and people's belief about their personal control over health-related behaviors predict subsequent health status. This
body of research has included such health-related behaviors as smoking, abusing alcohol, and unwise eating. In general, this
research indicates that people high on internal locus of control, compared with those high on external locus of control, are
more likely to enact health-related behaviors.
DELAY OF GRATIFICATION
Delay of gratification, the act of resisting an impulse to take an immediately available reward in the hope of obtaining a
more-valued reward in the future. The ability to delay gratification is essential to self-regulation, or self-control.
Mischel’s experiment
To study the conditions that promote delay of gratification, the American psychologist Walter Mischel and his colleagues
designed an experimental situation (“the marshmallow test”) in which a child is asked to choose between a larger treat, such as two
cookies or marshmallows, and a smaller treat, such as one cookie or marshmallow. After stating a preference for the larger treat, the
child learns that to obtain that treat, it is necessary to wait for the experimenter to return. The child is also told that if he or she signals
the experimenter, the experimenter will return and the child will receive the smaller treat. Thus, the smaller treat is available now, but
the larger treat requires waiting. To get the larger treat, the child must resist the temptation to get an immediate treat.
That experimental situation has proven very useful both in demonstrating the importance of the ability to delay gratification
and in identifying strategies that make it possible for children to delay gratification. Children who were best able to wait in that
situation when they were four years old are more socially and academically successful as high-school students and earn higher
Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores. The situation, adapted for adolescents and teens by the psychologist Edelgard Wulfert and her
colleagues, also revealed that middle- and high-school students who can wait a week for a monetary reward earn higher grades, show
less problem behaviour in school, and are less likely to use cigarettes, alcohol, and other drugs than their peers who choose not to wait.
Critique of Cognitive Social Learning Theory
Reciprocal determinism: Critics of social-cognitive theory argue that the theory does not provide a full explanation of how
social cognition, behavior, environment, and personality are related (known as “reciprocal determinism”).
One of the main criticisms of the social-cognitive theory is that it is not a unified theory. This means that the different aspects
of the theory may not be connected. For example, researchers currently cannot find a connection between observational
learning and self-efficacy within the social-cognitive perspective. The theory is so broad that not all of its component parts are
fully understood and integrated into a single explanation of learning and personality
The findings associated with this theory are still, for the most part, preliminary. It does not provide a full explanation or
description of how social cognition, behavior, environment, and personality are related, although there are several
hypotheses.
Another limitation is that not all social learning can be directly observed. Because of this, it can be difficult to quantify the
effect that social cognition has on development. Similarly, many aspects of personality are subjective and can be equally hard
to measure and quantify.
Finally, this theory tends to ignore maturation throughout the lifespan. Because of this, the understanding of how a child learns
through observation and how an adult learns through observation are not differentiated, and factors of development are not
included.
Cognitive social learning theory combines the rigors of learning theory with the speculative assumption that people are
forward-looking beings. It rates high on generating research and on internal consistency, and it rates about average on its
ability to be falsified, to organize data, and to guide action.
Concept of Humanity
Rotter and Mischel see people as goal-directed, cognitive animals whose perceptions of events are more crucial than the
events themselves. Cognitive social learning theory rates very high on social influences, and high on uniqueness of the
individual, free choice, teleology, and conscious processes. On the dimension of optimism versus pessimism, Rotter's view is
slightly more optimistic, whereas Mischel's is about in the middle.
***END of LESSON***
REFERENCES
Printed Resources
Feist J., Theories of Personality (9th Edition), 2018
Schultz, D.P., Schultz, S.E., Theories of Personality (10th Edition), 2018
Oliver P., Handbook of Personality, 2016
Coon, D & Mitterer, JO. Psychology: A Journey. Wadsworth, 2014.
Domjan, M. The Principles of Learning and Behavior, Seventh Edition. Cengage Learning, 2015.
Online Reference
Rotter and Mischel’s Cognitive Social Learning Theory, retrieved from: https://jfpvreflections.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/rotterand-mischels-cognitive-social-learningtheory/#:~:text=Both%20Julian%20Rotter%20and%20Walter,are%20major%20determinants%20of%20performance.
Social-Cognitive Perspectives on Personality, retrieved from: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundlesspsychology/chapter/social-cognitive-perspectives-on-personality/
The Social Learning Theory of Julian B. Rotter, retrieved from: http://psych.fullerton.edu/jmearns/rotter.htm