We met Albert Bandura for being the father of social learning and one of the most influential psychologists of all time, at which point last year he received the National Medal of Science at an event held at the White House.
At a time when behavioralism dominated the psychology of learning, Bandura went further and formulated his theory of social learning, from then on he began to give importance to cognitive and social processes that interfere with people’s learning, and not just to consider associations. between stimuli or reinforcements that follow behaviors, as conductism had done before.
- The person is no longer seen as a puppet that is made at the expense of the contingencies of the environment.
- Is able to put into play his private processes.
- Such as attention or thought.
- To learn.
However, Bandura recognizes the role of conditioning in the environment and is aware that it is an important part of learning, but that it is not the only one, for this author reinforcement is only necessary for execution to occur, not learning itself.
Our inner world is essential when it comes to incorporating new behaviors into our repertoire or interpreting the ones we already have, but we are unable to perform. Much of our current behaviors are due to imitation or addictive learning of role models that we think are relevant.
Who hasn’t learned to do the same things as a parent in a conversation, or who has overcome some fear by seeing that their best friend is capable of doing so?
According to Bandura, there are three components that interact with each other when it comes to learning, this is called reciprocal determinism or triad reciprocity, these are: person, environment and behavior. Therefore, the environment influences the subject and its behavior, but the subject also influences the environment through its behavior.
People learn by observing others, our environment. Not only have we learned reinforcements or punishments as the behavioralists postulated, but mere observation has already produced some learning effects on us without the need for direct reinforcements.
In the famous bobo doll experiment of Bandura, we can observe these effects, which was performed with children from three to five years old who were divided into two groups, one showed an aggressive model and the other a non-aggressive model, each group observed the model that corresponded to them in a room with toys. He was aggressive or not with the Bobo doll, so the children learned the same way to be aggressive or not with the doll.
This experience has great meaning for psychology, because we can understand why some people behave in a certain way. For example, the difficult behaviors of some teenagers born into unstructured families who have been exposed to certain behaviors until they finally learn by imitating their role models and incorporating them into their way of being.
According to Bandura, in addition to the three basic elements mentioned above, there are a number of processes necessary for observational learning to occur:
There are three different types of effects that can occur when observing the behavior of a model, these are the acquisition effect, the inhibitory or uninhibitive effect and the facilitator.
Many of our behaviors are acquired by imitation. While it is true that temperament, of more biological origin, plays an important role, the models around us are even more so, being shy, speaking slower or faster, our actions, whether we are aggressive people or have a phobia, are learned in part through modeling.
Bandura’s theory of social learning has been relevant not only to understand why people behave in a certain way, but also to address behaviors deemed inappropriate by observing new models that, for example, exceed their fears, behave differently. Them.