Social Learning Theories

Social Learning Theories

Introduction

The normal human transition in cognitive ability from birth to maturity is vast and, as yet, without adequate explanation. During the last century, scientific consensus changed from a view that newborns possess virtually no knowledge of the world or of themselves to a view that they actually possess considerable innate bias that guides their interaction with their physical and social environment. The conception of learning mechanisms that might help explain the dramatic development of competence has undergone considerable change as well.

The idea that learning might play a strong role in development from birth to maturity has existed since the earliest of written history. Herodotus (485-425 BP) recorded in 440 BP concern for the role of learning in children's development of language. The primary alternative to learning is usually stated in terms of the maturation of innate ability. While these opposing notions are of ancient origin, they continue their competition in developmental psychology at the present time.

In the past centuries, academic theories of learning were the outgrowth of scientists trying to replace folklore about the experiential role of repetition, effort, and temporal association in the production of such things as abilities, habits, and resilience of memories. The effort was to find objective laws like those being uncovered in physics and chemistry. For psychology, this would mean finding the laws that controlled the way experience changed an individual's capacity and/or propensity to behave.

Discussion

Social learning theory is an integration of differential association and behavioral learning theories. It wholly subsumes differential association theory by recasting it in the context of behavioral learning principles

Throughout the development of social learning theory, Akers intended the theory as an explanation of a wide variety of deviant behaviors. In his 1973 textbook, he illustrated how social learning theory could explain drug and alcohol use, various types of criminal behavior, mental illness, sexual deviance, and suicide. He has also emphasized repeatedly that the theory is capable of explaining not only deviant but conforming behavior as well. Despite these claims of generality, the broad scope of social learning theory has seldom been examined empirically. Most tests, including many conducted by Akers, have been limited to the analysis of minor self-reported delinquency and substance use. However, the boundaries of social learning theory have recently extended into more serious types of deviant conduct. Of these, three are noteworthy because of their distinctive group context: sexual aggression, gang delinquency, and terrorism

Social learning theory

Albert Bandura (1925) and others loosened the grip of behaviorism on learning theory. This occurred in three important respects. Initially, it was on the basis of a specific concern for the process of imitation or observational learning. Bandura and his colleagues pointed out that when a child changed a propensity to behave in a certain way simply by observing another person perform that behavior, the learning (i.e., the change in propensity) should be viewed as occurring in the absence of a learning trial. That is, imitation appeared to be unlike the simple laws of Pavlovian S-S ...