A Little History of Psychology by Nicky Hayes

Author:Nicky Hayes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300277364
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER 23

Social Learning

GROUP CONFLICT, NORMS AND LEADERSHIP STYLES

As we saw in Chapter 20, George Miller had to nerve himself up to challenge the dominance of behaviourism. But in the meantime, another psychologist was quietly getting on with it. Albert Bandura – justifiably one of the most famous names in psychology – also wasn’t happy with the behaviourist insistence that all learning derives from trial-and-error S-R (stimulus-response) connections.

Bandura consistently maintained a practical approach, possibly stemming from the way that, after finishing high school, he had spent some time working in Canada’s Yukon Territory. The hard-working, hard-drinking and gambling culture that he found there was very different from that of his Albertan village upbringing and helped him to gain a wider perspective on life in general. At university, he fell into psychology almost by accident. He shared a carpool with medical and engineering students who all had early starts. Since his own lectures didn’t begin until later, he looked for another early course to take, found psychology, and was hooked from then on. After graduation he went to the University of Iowa for his doctorate, working with Arthur Benton, who had been a student of William James and Clark Hull: the former was an experimentalist who recognised the importance of mind, and the latter a strict behaviourist, representing the dominant approach of the time.

Bandura was interested in learning, but he felt that the behaviourist insistence that learning could only happen from direct trial and error was too limiting. In fact, he believed, we do most of our learning second hand, by observing and imitating other people. Bandura began research on what he called ‘observational learning’ in the early 1960s and conducted the now-famous ‘bobo doll’ experiments. In these, children were shown films of adults acting aggressively towards, and even attacking, a large punch-bag-style model known as a bobo doll. They were then taken into a playroom that contained a number of toys, including a bobo doll. Repeated studies showed that the children would copy what they had seen on screen: they had learned by observing someone else’s behaviour, not by their own trial-and-error experience.

Bandura was careful to make sure that his research was carried out in strict accordance with behaviourist and experimental principles. His demonstrations of observational learning became widely accepted, quietly incorporating a small bit of mental representation into the strict behaviourism of learning theory. That’s why he is sometimes (quite rightly in my view) regarded as one of the founders of cognitive behaviourism. Bandura continued to study different aspects of imitation and identification, focusing particularly on the effects of modelling and self-regulation. By 1977, the cognitive movement was gaining ground in America, and he was able to be upfront about cognitive influences. His book, Social Learning Theory, openly discussed how social influences affect both cognition and behaviour. Quietly, Bandura had made a massive impact on psychology’s knowledge of learning processes. But his legacy didn’t stop there. He went on to explore the various mechanisms of personal agency, which we will come back to in Chapter 34.

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