Bandura's Social Learning Theory

Learning by observation develops early in development: as early as 14 months
Television violence has been seen to "model" children to be more violent
Assumptions of this theory:
1. People are active agents
2. Emphasizes cognitive processes
  1. Language ability
  2. Observational learning
  3. Purposeful behaviour
  4. Self-analysis
3. Emphasizes social processes
4. Behaviour is situation specific
5. Reciprocal determinism
Bandura was interested in…
1. Behaviours acquisition vs performance
2. Acquisition reinforcement not essential
3. Performance reinforcement essential
Stages in observational learning process
1. Attention
  1.  To learn, you need to be paying attention 
  2. Pay attention eg: if model is interesting or novel = positive effect on learning 
  3. Not pay attention eg: distracted, not interesting = negative effect on learning
2. Retention
  1. Store information
  2. The ability to pull up information later and act on it is vital to observational learning
3. Reproduction
  1. Perform the behaviour you observed 
  2. Further practice of the learned behaviour leads to improvement and skill advancement
4. Motivation/Reinforcement
  1. You have to be motivated to imitate the behaviour that has been modeled
  2. Reinforcement and punishment play an important role in motivation (either directly experienced or observing someone else be reinforced/punished – vicarious conditioning)

Resource summary

	Created by Cameron Langfield almost 11 years ago