14.4 Behaviourist and Social-Cognitive Perspectives on Personality
Learning Objectives
- Describe the behaviourist perspective on personality.
- Describe the cognitive perspective on personality.
- Describe the social cognitive perspective on personality.
In contrast to the psychodynamic approaches of Freud and the neo-Freudians, which relate personality to inner and hidden processes, the learning approaches discussed in this section focus only on observable behaviour. This illustrates a significant advantage of the learning approaches over psychodynamics. Because learning approaches involve observable and measurable phenomena, they can be scientifically tested.
The behavioural perspective
Behaviourists do not believe in biological determinism; they do not see personality traits as inborn. Instead, they view personality as significantly shaped by the reinforcements and consequences outside of the organism. In other words, people behave in a consistent manner based on prior learning. B. F. Skinner, a strict behaviourist, believed that environment was solely responsible for all behaviour, including the enduring, consistent behaviour patterns studied by personality theorists.
As you may recall from your study on the psychology of learning, Skinner proposed that we demonstrate consistent behaviour patterns because we have developed certain response tendencies (Skinner, 1953). In other words, we learn to behave in particular ways. We increase the behaviours that lead to positive consequences, and we decrease the behaviours that lead to negative consequences. Skinner disagreed with Freud’s idea that personality is fixed in childhood. He argued that personality develops over our entire life, not only in the first few years. Our responses can change as we come across new situations; therefore, we can expect more variability over time in personality than Freud would anticipate. For example, consider a young woman, Greta, a risk taker. She drives fast and participates in dangerous sports such as hang gliding and kiteboarding, but after she gets married and has children, the system of reinforcements and punishments in her environment changes. Speeding and extreme sports are no longer reinforced, so she no longer engages in those behaviours. In fact, Greta now describes herself as a cautious person.
The social-cognitive perspective
Albert Bandura agreed with Skinner that personality develops through learning. He disagreed, however, with Skinner’s strict behaviourist approach to personality development because he felt that thinking and reasoning are important components of learning. He presented a social-cognitive theory of personality that emphasizes both learning and cognition as sources of individual differences in personality. In social-cognitive theory, the concepts of reciprocal determinism, observational learning, and self-efficacy all play a part in personality development.
In contrast to Skinner’s idea that the environment alone determines behaviour, Bandura (1986) proposed the concept of reciprocal determinism, in which cognitive processes, behaviour, and context all interact, each factor influencing and being influenced by the others simultaneously (see Figure 14.16). Cognitive processes refer to all characteristics previously learned, including beliefs, expectations, and personality characteristics. Behaviour refers to anything that we do that may be rewarded or punished. Finally, the context in which the behaviour occurs refers to the environment or situation, which includes rewarding and punishing stimuli.
Consider, for example, that you’re at a festival, and one of the attractions is bungee jumping from a bridge. Do you do it? In this example, the behaviour is bungee jumping. Cognitive factors that might influence this behaviour include your beliefs, values, and your past experiences with similar behaviours. Finally, context refers to the reward structure for the behaviour. According to reciprocal determinism, all of these factors are in play.
Bandura’s key contribution to learning theory was the idea that much learning is vicarious. We learn by observing someone else’s behaviour and its consequences, which Bandura called observational learning. He felt that this type of learning also plays a part in the development of our personality. Just as we learn individual behaviours, we learn new behaviour patterns when we see them performed by other people or models. Drawing on the behaviourists’ ideas about reinforcement, Bandura suggested that whether we choose to imitate a model’s behaviour depends on whether we see the model reinforced or punished. Through observational learning, we come to learn what behaviours are acceptable and rewarded in our culture, and we also learn to inhibit deviant or socially unacceptable behaviours by seeing what behaviours are punished.
We can see the principles of reciprocal determinism at work in observational learning. For example, personal factors determine which behaviours in the environment a person chooses to imitate, and those environmental events in turn are processed cognitively according to other personal factors.
Bandura (1977, 1995) has studied a number of cognitive and personal factors that affect learning and personality development. Most recently, Bandura has focused on the concept of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is our level of confidence in our own abilities, developed through our social experiences. Self-efficacy affects how we approach challenges and reach goals. In observational learning, self-efficacy is a cognitive factor that affects which behaviours we choose to imitate as well as our success in performing those behaviours.
People who have high self-efficacy believe that their goals are within reach, have a positive view of challenges by seeing them as tasks to be mastered, develop a deep interest in and strong commitment to the activities in which they are involved, and quickly recover from setbacks. Conversely, people with low self-efficacy avoid challenging tasks because they doubt their ability to be successful, tend to focus on failure and negative outcomes, and lose confidence in their abilities if they experience setbacks. Feelings of self-efficacy can be specific to certain situations. For instance, a student might feel confident in their ability in English class but much less so in math class, or vice versa.
Julian Rotter and locus of control
Julian Rotter (1966) proposed the concept of locus of control, another cognitive factor that affects learning and personality development. 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. In Rotter’s view, people possess either an internal or an external locus of control (see Figure 14.17). Those of us with an internal locus of control tend to believe that most of our outcomes are the direct result of our efforts. Those of us with an external locus of control tend to believe that our outcomes are outside of our control and are instead controlled by other people, luck, or chance. For example, say you didn’t spend much time studying for your psychology test and went out to dinner with friends instead. When you receive your test score, you see that you earned a D. If you possess an internal locus of control, you would most likely admit that you failed because you didn’t spend enough time studying and decide to study more for the next test. On the other hand, if you possess an external locus of control, you might conclude that the test was too hard and not bother studying for the next test because you figure you will fail it anyway. Researchers have found that people with an internal locus of control perform better academically, achieve more in their careers, are more independent, are healthier, are better able to cope, and are less depressed than people who have an external locus of control (Benassi, Sweeney, & Durfour, 1988; Lefcourt, 1982; Maltby, Day, & Macaskill, 2013; Whyte, 1977, 1978, 1980).
The person-situation debate and alternatives to the trait perspective
Walter Mischel (1930–2018), a student of Julian Rotter and a colleague of Albert Bandura, argued that understanding personality ought to be understood in the context of situations in which it is used. Mischel suggested that it wasn’t personality that was consistent but behaviour in similar situations that was repeated. When Walter Mischel published a book called Personality and Assessment (1968), his suggestion that personality traits were an illusion and people are not consistent from one situation to the next shook the foundation of personality psychology. In this book, Mischel suggested that if one looks closely at people’s behaviour across many different situations, the consistency is really not that impressive. In other words, children who cheat on tests at school may steadfastly follow all rules when playing games and may never tell a lie to their parents. In other words, he suggested there may not be any general trait of honesty that links these seemingly related behaviours. Furthermore, Mischel suggested that observers may believe that broad personality traits like honesty exist, when in fact, this belief is an illusion. The debate that followed the publication of Mischel’s book was called the person-situation debate because it pitted the power of personality against the power of situational factors as determinants of the behaviour that people exhibit.
Because of the findings that Mischel emphasized, many psychologists focused on an alternative to the trait perspective. Instead of studying broad, context-free descriptions, like the trait terms we have described so far, Mischel thought that psychologists should focus on people’s distinctive reactions to specific situations. For instance, although there may not be a broad and general trait of honesty, some children may be especially likely to cheat on a test when the risk of being caught is low and the rewards for cheating are high. Others might be motivated by the sense of risk involved in cheating and may do so even when the rewards are not very high. Thus, the behaviour itself results from the child’s unique evaluation of the risks and rewards present at that moment, along with their evaluation of their abilities and values. Because of this, the same child might act very differently in different situations. Thus, Mischel thought that specific behaviours were driven by the interaction between very specific, psychologically meaningful features of the situation in which people found themselves, the person’s unique way of perceiving that situation, and their abilities for dealing with it. Mischel and others argued that it was these social-cognitive processes that underlie people’s reactions to specific situations that provide some consistency when situational features are the same. If so, then studying these broad traits might be more fruitful than cataloging and measuring narrow, context-free traits like extraversion or neuroticism.
One of Mischel’s most notable contributions to personality psychology was his ideas on self-regulation. According to Len Lecci and Jeffrey Magnavita (2013), “Self-regulation is the process of identifying a goal or set of goals and, in pursuing these goals, using both internal (e.g., thoughts and affect) and external (e.g., responses of anything or anyone in the environment) feedback to maximize goal attainment” (p. 6.3). Self-regulation is also known as will power. When we talk about will power, we tend to think of it as the ability to delay gratification. For example, Bettina’s teenage daughter made strawberry cupcakes, and they looked delicious. However, Bettina forfeited the pleasure of eating one because she is training for a 5K race and wants to be fit and do well in the race. Would you be able to resist getting a small reward now in order to get a larger reward later? This is the question Mischel investigated in his now-classic marshmallow test.
Mischel designed a study to assess self-regulation in young children. In the marshmallow study, Walter Mischel, Ebbe Ebbesen, and Antonette Raskoff Zeiss placed a preschool child in a room with one marshmallow on the table. The child was told that they could either eat the marshmallow now or wait until the researcher returned to the room, and then they could have two marshmallows (Mischel, Ebbesen & Zeiss, 1972). This was repeated with hundreds of preschoolers. What the researchers found was that young children differ in their degree of self-control. Mischel and colleagues continued to follow this group of preschoolers through high school, and what do you think they discovered? The children who had more self-control in preschool — that is, the ones who waited for the bigger reward — were more successful in high school. They had higher SAT scores, had positive peer relationships, and were less likely to have substance abuse issues; as adults, they also had more stable marriages (Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989; Mischel et al., 2011). On the other hand, those children who had poor self-control in preschool — that is, the ones who grabbed the one marshmallow — were not as successful in high school, and they were found to have academic and behavioural problems.
In the years after the publication of Mischel’s (1968) book, debates raged about whether personality truly exists, and if so, how it should be studied. As is often the case, it turns out that a more moderate middle ground than what the situationists proposed could be reached. It is certainly true, as Mischel pointed out, that a person’s behaviour in one specific situation is not a good guide to how that person will behave in a very different specific situation. Someone who is extremely talkative at one specific party may sometimes be reticent to speak up during class and may even act like a wallflower at a different party. However, this does not mean that personality does not exist, nor does it mean that people’s behaviour is completely determined by situational factors. Indeed, research conducted after the person-situation debate shows that, on average, the effect of the “situation” is about as large as that of personality traits. It is also true that if psychologists assess a broad range of behaviours across many different situations, there are general tendencies that emerge. Personality traits give an indication about how people will act on average, but frequently, they are not so good at predicting how a person will act in a specific situation at a certain moment in time. Thus, to best capture broad traits, one must assess aggregate behaviours, which are averaged over time and across many different types of situations. Most modern personality researchers agree that there is a place for broad personality traits and for the narrower units such as those studied by Walter Mischel.
Source: Adapted from Diener and Lucas (2020) and Spielman et al. (2019).
Key Takeaways
- Behaviourists view personality as significantly shaped by reinforcements and consequences from the environment.
- In social-cognitive theory, the concepts of reciprocal determinism, observational learning, and self-efficacy all play a part in personality development.
- Rotter proposed that locus of control is an important aspect of personality.
- Mischel’s person-situation theory argued that cognitive interpretations of situations must be accounted for in personality.
Image Attributions
Figure 14.16: Used under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Figure 14.17: Used under a CC BY 4.0 license.
Figure 14.18: 2013 09 26 COE Orientation 679 by uoeducation is used under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license.
References
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Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Bandura, A. (1995). Self-efficacy in changing societies. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Benassi, V. A., Sweeney, P. D., & Dufour, C. L. (1988). Is there a relation between locus of control orientation and depression? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 97(3), 357–367.
Diener, E., & Lucas, R. E. (2020). Personality traits. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds.), Noba textbook series: Psychology. Champaign, IL: DEF. Retrieved from http://noba.to/96u8ecgw
Lecci, L. B., & Magnavita, J. J. (2013). Personality theories: Scientific approach. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education.
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Maltby, J., Day, L., & Macaskill, A. (2013). Personality, individual differences and intelligence (3rd ed.). London, England: Pearson.
Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and assessment. New York, NY: Wiley.
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Mischel, W., Ebbesen, E. B., & Zeiss, A. R. (1972). Cognitive and attentional mechanisms in delay of gratification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 21(2), 204–218.
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Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York, NY: The Free Press.
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