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Chapter 18
Rotter and Mischel: Cognitive Social Learning
Theory
Learning Objectives
After reading Chapter 18, you should be able to:
- List Rotter's four variables of prediction and briefly explain each.
- Discuss Rotter's basic prediction formula and its uses.
- List and give examples of Rotter's categories of needs.
- Discuss Rotter's generalized expectancies and their measurement.
- Explain the difference between internal and external control and list several misconceptions regarding internal and external control of reinforcement.
- Discuss Mischel's conditional view of personal dispositions.
- Critique Mischel's notion of the consistency paradox.
- Discuss Mischel and Shoda's cognitive-affective view of personality.
- List and discuss Mischel and Shoda's cognitive-affective units.
- Discuss research on Rotter's locus of control model. 1. Overview of Cognitive Social Learning Theory Both Julian Rotter and Walter Mischel believe that cognitive factors, more than immediate reinforcements, determine how people will react to environmental forces. Both theorists suggest that our expectations of future events are major determinants of performance. II. Biography of Julian Rotter Julian Rotter was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1916. As a high school student, he became familiar with some of the writings of Freud and Adler, but he majored in chemistry rather than psychology at Brooklyn College. In 1941, he received a PhD in clinical psychology from Indiana University. After World War II, he took a position at Ohio State, where one of his students was Walter Mischel. In 1963, he moved to the University of Connecticut and has remained there since retirement. III. Introduction to Rotter's Social Learning Theory
Reinforcement value is a person's preference for any particular reinforcement over other reinforcements if all are equally likely to occur. Internal reinforcement is the individual's perception of an event, whereas external reinforcement refers to society's evaluation of an event. Reinforcement-reinforcement sequences suggest that the value of an event is a function of one's expectation that a particular reinforcement will lead to future reinforcements. D. Psychological Situation The psychological situation is that part of the external and internal world to which a person is responding. Behavior is a function of the interaction of people with their meaningful environment. E. Basic Prediction Formula Hypothetically, in any specific situation, behavior can be predicted by the basic prediction formula, which states that the potential for a behavior to occur in a particular situation in relation to a given reinforcement is a function of people's expectancy that their behavior will be followed by that reinforcement in that situation. V. Predicting General Behaviors The basic prediction is too specific to give clues about how a person will generally behave. A. Generalized Expectancies To make more general predictions of behavior, one must know people's generalized expectancies, or their expectations based on similar past experiences that a given behavior will be reinforced. Generalized expectancies include people's needs, that is, behaviors that move them toward a goal.
B. Needs Needs refer to functionally related categories of behaviors. Rotter listed six broad categories of needs, with each need being related to behaviors that lead to the same or similar reinforcements: (1) r ecognition-status refers to the need to excel, to achieve, and to have others recognize one's worth; (2) dominance is the need to control the behavior of others, to be in charge, or to gain power over others; (3) independence is the need to be free from the domination of others; (4) protection-dependence is the need to have others take care of us and to protect us from harm; (5) love and affection are needs to be warmly accepted by others and to be held in friendly regard; and (6) physical comfort includes those behaviors aimed at securing food, good health, and physical security. Three need components are: (1) need potential , or the possible occurrences of a set of functionally related behaviors directed toward the satisfaction of similar goals; (2) freedom of movement, or a person's overall expectation of being reinforced for performing those behaviors that are directed toward satisfying some general need; and (3) need value , or the extent to which people prefer one set of reinforcements to another. Need components are analogous to the more specific concepts of behavior potential, expectancy, and reinforcement value. C. General Prediction Formula The general prediction formula states that need potential is a function of freedom of movement and need value. Rotter's two
In helping clients change low expectancies of success, Rotter uses a variety of approaches, including reinforcing positive behaviors, ignoring inappropriate behaviors, giving advice, modeling appropriate behaviors, and pointing out the long-range consequences of both positive and negative behaviors. VIII. Introduction to Mischel's Personality System Like Bandura and Rotter, Mischel believes that cognitive factors, such as expectancies, subjective perceptions, values, goals, and personal standards are important in shaping personality. In his early theory, Mischel seriously questioned the consistency of personality, but more recently, he and Yuichi Shoda have advanced the notion that behavior is also a function of relatively stable cognitive-affective units. IX. Biography of Walter Mischel Walter Mischel was born in Vienna in 1930, the second son of upper-middle-class parents. When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, his family moved to the United States and eventually settled in Brooklyn. Mischel received an MA from City College of New York and a PhD from Ohio State, where he was influenced by Julian Rotter. He is currently a professor at Columbia University. X. Background of the Cognitive-Affective Personality System Mischel originally believed that human behavior was mostly a function of the situation, but more lately he has recognized the importance of relatively permanent cognitive-affective units. Nevertheless, Mischel's theory continues to recognize the apparent inconsistency of some behaviors.
A. The Consistency Paradox The consistency paradox refers to the observation that, although both lay people and professionals tend to believe that behavior is quite consistent, research suggests that it is not. Mischel recognizes that, indeed, some traits are consistent over time, but he contends that there is little evidence to suggest they are consistent from one situation to another. B. Person-Situation Interaction Mischel believes that behavior is best predicted from an understanding of the person, the situation, and the interaction between person and situation. Thus, behavior is not the result of some global personality trait, but rather of people's perceptions of themselves in a particular situation. XI. Cognitive-Affective Personality System However, Mischel does not believe that inconsistencies in behavior are due solely to the situation; he recognizes that inconsistent behaviors reflect stable patterns of variation within a person. He and Shoda see these stable variations in behavior in the following framework: If A, then X; but if B, then Y_._ People's pattern of variability is their behavioral signature, or their unique and stable pattern of behaving differently in different situations. A. Behavior Prediction Mischel's basic theoretical position for predicting and explaining behavior is as follows: If personality is a stable system that processes information about the situation, then as people encounter different situations, they should behave differently as
The theories of both Rotter and Mischel have sparked an abundance of related research, with Rotter's locus of control being one of the most frequently researched areas in psychology, and Mischel's notion of delay of gratification, and Mischel and Shoda's cognitive-affective personality system also receiving wide attention. A. Locus of Control, Depression, and Suicide During the genocide of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during World War II, only one half of one percent of people in Nazi-occupied territory helped Jewish neighbors whose lives were in peril (Oliner & Oliner, 1988), in part because the peril to their own lives equaled the danger to the lives of those they assisted. Elizabeth Midlarsky and her colleagues wanted to use personality variables to predict who was a Holocaust hero and who was a bystander during World War II (Midlarsky, Fagin Jones, & Corley, 2005). One of the personality variables they selected was locus of control, along with autonomy, risk taking, social responsibility, authoritarianism, empathy, and altruistic moral reasoning. They found that internal locus of control was positively related to more autonomy, risk taking, sense of social responsibility, tolerance, empathy, and altruistic moral reasoning, and to less authoritarianism. Statistical analysis supported the researchers’ hypothesis that personality would predict who was a hero and who was not, being correct 93% of the time. A higher sense of internal control was associated with heroism in this study. B. Person-Situation Interaction
Mischel and associates have reported hundreds of studies influenced by his cognitive-affective personality system. These studies—which are based on the statement, "If I am in situation A, then I do X; but If I am in situation B, then I do Y." These studies have generally supported Mischel and Shoda's conception of the conditional nature of human behavior. One of Mischel’s students, Lara Kammrath, and her colleagues recently conducted an elegant study (2005) illustrating the “If…then…” framework very clearly (Kammrath, Mendoza-Denton, & Mischel, 2005). This study showed that people understand the if-then framework and use it when judging others; in other words, the average person understands that people behave differently in different situations, and depending on their personality, people adjust their behavior to match the situation. Mischel and colleagues conducted further studies on the conditional nature of dispositions (Mendoza- Denton, Ayduck, Mischel, Shoda, &Testa, 2001), and found that conditional and interactionist self-evaluations tend to buffer negative reactions to failure. They concluded that their conceptualization of the person-situation environment as social- cognitive and interactionist is more applicable to understanding human behavior than the traditional, “decontextualized” views of personality, in which people behave in a given way regardless of the context. XIII. Critique of Cognitive Social Learning Theory Cognitive social learning theory combines the rigors of learning theory with the speculative assumption that people are forward-
- Any condition that moves a person toward a ___________________ defines Rotter's empirical law of effect.
- Behavior _________________ refers to the likelihood that a given behavior will occur in a particular situation.
- People's expectation of being reinforced is called their ____________________________.
- Behavior potential is a function of both ___________________ value and expectancy.
- External ____________________ includes events, conditions, or actions that our culture values.
- Rotter sees people as ________________ animals whose perceptions of events are more important than the events themselves.
- The need to be free of the domination of others is called ______________________.
- Need _________________________ refers to the possible occurrence of a set of functionally related behaviors directed toward the satisfaction of the same or similar goals.
- Internal control of reinforcement is a ____________________ expectancy.
- Rotter sees _______________________ behavior as those actions that fail to move a person closer to a desired goal.
- Mischel proposed a _______________________ view of personal dispositions that suggests that behavior is caused by people's perception of themselves in a particular situation.
- The ______________________ paradox refers to the observation that many people believe that behavior is stable from one situation to another despite evidence that it is not.
- Mischel and Shoda's cognitive-____________________ personality system suggests that behavior reflects stable patterns of variation.
- Intelligence is a ________________________ variable and may be one reason why traits are as consistent as they are.
- Our ____________________ strategies enable us to categorize information from external stimuli.
- Mischel's cognitive-affective personality system suggests that behavior is largely shaped by an interaction of _________________ personality traits and the situation.
_____7. Freedom of movement is analogous to the concept of expectancy.
_____8. According to Rotter, people's psychological situation is more important than their physical environment.
_____9. One of the components of Rotter's general prediction formula is freedom of movement.
____10. Rotter's Internal-External Control Scale classifies people into two distinct groups.
____11. Interpersonal trust refers to the belief that people are naturally good.
____12. A person who scores high on the Interpersonal Trust Scale is likely to believe that most people can be counted on to do what they say they will do.
____13. Rotter believes that maladaptive behavior inevitably arises from the combination of high need value and low freedom of movement.
____14. The personality theory of Mischel and Shoda is called behavioral social learning theory.
____15. Mischel's theory of personality shows the influence of both Bandura and Rotter.
____16. Mischel was born in Vienna, at a time when Carl Jung was living there.
____17. Mischel believes that behavior is much more consistent than most psychologists assume.
____18. During the late 1920s, Hartshorne and May found that school children who were honest in one situation were also honest in other situations.
____19. Mischel holds that people have no consistent traits or dispositions.
____20. Mischel and Shoda argue that inconsistencies in a person's behavior are due solely to the situation.
Multiple Choice
______1. Rotter's theory assumes that a. most human motivation is unconscious. b. motivation is goal directed. c. natural selection determines behavior.
______5. Behavioral potential can be predicted when reinforcement value is held constant and a. expectancy is also held constant. b. expectancy varies. c. drive strength is held constant. d. drive strength varies.
______6. Rotter called a person's subjective perception of the value of an event a. the empirical law of effect b. generalized expectancy c. external reinforcement d. internal reinforcement e. negative reinforcement
______7. Rotter's basic prediction formula states that behavior potential is a function of a person's expectancy that behavior will be followed by reinforcement in a particular situation and by a. one's physical comfort. b. need potential. c. reinforcement value. d. freedom of movement.
______8. The basic prediction formula is most useful for making specific predictions. To make more generalized predictions, Rotter introduced the concept of
a. needs. b. cognition. c. goals. d. reinforcement value.
_____9. Which of these is NOT included among Rotter's list of needs? a. physical comfort b. dominance c. esteem d. love and affection e. independence
_____10. The specific concept of expectancy is analogous to this term in the general prediction formula. a. need potential b. need value c. freedom of movement d. reinforcement value
_____11. The extent to which a person prefers one set of reinforcements to another is called ______. a. need potential b. the law of effect c. need value d. interpersonal trust
