Chapter 15
DAVID BUSS’S EVOLUTIONARY THEORY OF PERSONALITY
ABOUT THE THEORIST
David Buss
- Born on April 14, 1953 in Indianapolis,
Indiana
- Father: Arnold H. Buss Sr.; Mother: Edith
Nolte
- His father was a professor in psychology at
the University of Pittsburg, then Texas.
- Arnold Buss’s research focused on
aggression, psychopathology, self-
consciousness, and social anxiety
OVERVIEW
- Artificial Selection
PRINCIPLES OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
o Occurs when humans select
particular desirable traits in a
breeding species.
- Natural Selection
o Simply a more general form of
artificial selection in which nature
rather than people select the traits
▪ Occurs when traits become
either more or less common in a
species over long periods of
time because they do or do not
lead to greater survivability
▪ Traits get “selected” simply
because they lead to greater
survivability and hence more
offspring with that trait survive
to reproductive age.
- Sexual Selection
o Operates when members of the
opposite sex find certain traits more
appealing and attractive than others
and thereby produce offspring with
those traits
o Have to be markers of fitness that
can’t be easily faked
o These traits are handicaps that only
the truly strong and healthy can pull
off.
- By-products
o Evolved strategies that solve
important survival and/or
reproductive problems.
o Often the products of natural or
sexual selection and must have a
genetic or inherited basis to them
- Noise
o Also known as “random effects,”
occurs when evolution produces
random changes in design that do
not affect function.
o Tends to be produced by chance and
not selected for
- Scientific study of human thought
- Focuses on four big questions:
o Why is the human mind designed the
way it is, and how did it come to take
its current form?
o How is the human mind designed;
that is, what are its parts and current
structure?
o What function do the parts of the
mind have, and what is it designed to
do?
 o How do the evolved mind and current
environment interact to shape
human behavior?
EVOLUTIONARY THEORY OF PERSONALITY
- Assumes that the true origins of these
traits reach far back in ancestral times
- The true origin of personality is evolution,
meaning that it is caused by an interaction
between an ever-changing environment
and a changing body and brain.
- Attempts once again to explain the grand
view of human personality— its ultimate
origins as well as its overall function and
structure
- Starts with the assumption that individual
members of any species differ from one
another
- The Nature and Nurture of Personality
o Fundamental Situational Error
▪ The tendency to assume that the
environment alone can produce
behavior void of a stable internal
mechanism
o Fundamental Attribution Error
▪ Our tendency to ignore
situational and environmental
forces when explaining the
behavior of other people and
instead focus on internal
dispositions
- Adaptive Problems and Their Solutions
o Mechanisms
▪ Two basic problems of life
▪ Operate according to principles
in different adaptive domains
▪ Number in the dozens or
hundreds (maybe even
thousands)
▪ Complex solutions to specific
adaptive problems (survival,
reproduction)
▪ There are two specific main
classes of mechanism:
❖ Physical Mechanism
➢ Physiological organs
and systems that
evolved to solve
problems of survival
❖ Psychological Mechanisms
➢ Internal and specific
cognitive, motivational,
and personality
systems that solve
specific survival and
reproduction problems.
▪ Anatomical and physiological
mechanisms are often shared by
many species, whereas
psychological mechanisms are
often more specific to species.
▪ Evolutionary biology focuses on
the origin of physical
mechanisms, whereas
evolutionary psychology focuses
on the origin of psychological
mechanisms.
▪ Psychological mechanisms have
behavioral consequences,
tactics, and actions associated
with them.
❖ The main job of an
evolutionary model of
personality is to describe,
study, and explain these
enduring psychological
mechanisms.
- Evolved Mechanisms
o Three main categories:
▪ Goals/Drives/Motives
❖ Two goals and motives that
act as evolved mechanisms
are power and intimacy.
❖ These drives take many
different forms, with power
taking the form of
aggression, dominance,
achievement, status,
“negotiation of hierarchy,”
and intimacy taking the
form of love, attachment,
"reciprocal alliance".
❖ Evolutionary psychology
refers to these drives as
 “adaptations” because they
directly affect the health
and well-being of the
person.
❖ Motivation and emotion are
directly linked with stable
personality traits
❖ Motivation is part of
personality.
▪ Emotions
❖ These dispositions are
inherently evaluative, that
is, they allow others to
evaluate us on the adaptive
problems; dispositions
signal to other people their
ability to solve survival and
reproductive problems.
▪ Personality Traits
❖ Five Personality Dimensions
➢ Surgency
✓ Involves the
disposition to
experience - Origins of Individual Differences
positive emotional
states and to
engage in one’s
environment and
to be sociable and
self-confident
➢ Agreeableness or
Hostility
✓ To be hostile and
aggressive on the
other.
➢ Emotional Stability or
Neuroticism
✓ A dispositional
trait; Emotional
stability involves
one’s ability to
handle stress or
not
✓ Fear and anxiety
are adaptive
emotions. Without
them we would
certainly die as
individuals and as
a species.
➢ Conscientiousness
✓ One’s capacity and
commitment to
work
➢ Openness
✓ Involves one’s
propensity for
innovation and
ability to solve
problems. It is
closely aligned
with intellect and
intelligence but
also a willingness
to try new things
and a willingness
to have novel
experiences rather
than sticking with
one’s routine
o Environmental Sources
▪ Early Experiential Calibration
❖ Childhood experiences
make some behavioral
strategies more likely than
others
▪ Alternative Niche Specialization
❖ Different people find what
makes them stand out from
others in order to gain
attention from parents or
potential mates.
o Heritable/Genetic Sources
▪ Body type, facial morphology,
and degree of physical
attractiveness act as heritable
sources of individual differences
o Non-adaptive Sources
▪ Do not benefit survival or
reproductive success
▪ Neutral genetic variations
❖ Most often take the form of
genetic mutations
 o Maladaptive Sources
▪ Those that actively harm one’s
chance for survival or decrease
one’s sexual attractiveness.
▪ One genetic source is genetic
defect
▪ Environmental source is seen in
environmental trauma
COMMON MISUNDERSTANDINGS IN
EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
- Evolution Implies Genetic Determinism
o Behavior as set in stone and void of
influence from the environment
o “Nature and nurture”
o Epigenetics
▪ Change in gene function that
does not involve changes in DNA
- Executing Adaptations Requires Conscious
Mechanisms
o To say that mechanisms (cognitive
and personality) evolved to solve
important problems of survival and
reproduction does not mean they
require complex (conscious)
mathematical abilities to operate.
- Mechanisms are Optimally Designed
o Evolutionary change occurs over
hundreds of generations and there is
always a lag between adaptation and
environment.
 Chapter 16
B.F. SKINNER’S BEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS
ABOUT THE THEORIST o Thorndike observed that learning
takes place mostly because of the
B.F. Skinner
effects that follow a response
- The Work of John B. Watson
o In "Psychology as the Behaviorist
Views It", Watson (1913) argued that
human behavior, like the behavior of
animals and machines, can be
studied objectively. He attacked not
only consciousness and introspection
but also the notions of instinct,
sensation, perception, motivation
SCIENTIFIC BEHAVIORISM
- Mental states, mind and imagery
- Cosmology
o Skinner insisted, psychology must
avoid internal mental factors and
- Full Name: Burrhus Frederic Skinner
confine itself to observable physical
- Born on March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna,
events.
Pennsylvania
- Philosophy of Science
- Father: William Skinner; Mother: Grace
o Skinner (1978) used principles
Mange Burrhus Skinner
derived from laboratory studies to
- Skinner grew up in a comfortable, happy,
interpret the behavior of human
upper middle-class home where his
beings but insisted that
parents practiced the values of
interpretation should not be
temperance, service, honesty, and hard
confused with an explanation of why
work
people behave the way they do.
- His family were Presbyterians but he
- Characteristics of Science
began to lose faith and stopped practicing
o Science, in contrast to art,
religion by high school
philosophy, and literature, advances
OVERVIEW in a cumulative manner
▪ Science is unique not because
- Behaviorism
of technology but rather
o Emerged from laboratory studies of
because of its attitude.
animals and humans
o Science is an attitude that places
- Radical Behaviorism
value on empirical observation above
o A doctrine that avoids all hypothetical
all else.
constructs, such as ego, traits,
▪ “It is a disposition to deal with
drives, needs, hunger, and so forth.
facts rather than with what
PRECURSORS TO SKINNER’S SCIENTIFIC someone has said about them”
BEHAVIORISM ▪ Three Components to the
- Law of Effect Scientific Attitude:
❖ Rejects authority
 ❖ Demands intellectual
honesty
❖ A search for order and
lawful relationships
CONDITIONING
- 2 Kinds of Conditioning
o Classical Conditioning
▪ A response is drawn out of the
organism by a specific,
identifiable stimulus.
▪ Neutral (conditioned) stimulus
is paired with—that is,
immediately precedes—an
unconditioned stimulus a
number of times until it is
capable of bringing about a
previously unconditioned
response, now called the
conditioned response.
o Operant Conditioning
▪ A behavior is made more likely
to recur when it is immediately
reinforced
▪ The key to operant
conditioning is the immediate
reinforcement of a response.
▪ Organism first does something
and then is reinforced by the
environment.
▪ Reinforcement increases the
probability that the same
behavior will occur again
▪ Shaping
❖ Successive
Approximations
➢ The experimenter or
the environment
gradually shapes the
final complex set of
behaviors
▪ Operant Discrimination
❖ Discrimination is not an
ability that we possess but
a consequence of our
reinforcement history.
▪ Stimulus Generalization
❖ A response to a similar
environment in the
absence of previous
reinforcement
▪ Reinforcement
❖ Has two effects:
Strengthens behavior and
rewards the person
❖ Positive Reinforcement
➢ Any stimulus that,
when added to a
situation, increases
the probability that a
given behavior will
occur is termed a
positive reinforcer
❖ Negative Reinforcement
➢ The removal of an
aversive stimulus
from a situation also
increases the
probability that the
preceding behavior
will occur
➢ This removal results
in negative
reinforcement
▪ Punishment
❖ The presentation of an
aversive stimulus, such as
an electric shock, or the
removal of a positive one.
❖ Effects of Punishment
➢ The effects of
punishment are not
opposite those of
reinforcement.
➢ Punishment ordinarily
is imposed to prevent
people from acting in
a particular way.
➢ One effect of
punishment is to
suppress behavior.
➢ Another effect of
punishment is the
conditioning of a
 negative feeling by
associating a strong
aversive stimulus with
the behavior being
punished.
✓ This negative
emotion then
serves to prevent
the undesirable
behavior from
recurring.
Lamentably, it
offers no positive
instruction to the
child.
➢ A third outcome of ▪ Schedules of Reinforcement
punishment is the
spread of its effects.
✓ Any stimulus
associated with
the punishment
may be
suppressed or
avoided.
▪ Punishment and Reinforced
Compared
❖ Punishment has several
characteristics in common
with reinforcement. Just
as there are two kinds of
reinforcements (positive
and negative), there are
two types of punishment.
The first requires the
presentation of an
aversive stimulus; the
second involves the
removal of a positive
reinforcer.
▪ Conditioned and Generalized
Reinforcements
❖ Conditioned Reinforcers
➢ Environmental stimuli
that are not by nature
satisfying but become
so because they are
associated with such
unlearned or primary
reinforcers
❖ Generalized Reinforcer
➢ Because it is
associated with more
than one primary
reinforcer.
❖ Skinner (1953) recognized
five important generalized
reinforcers that sustain
much of human behavior:
attention, approval,
affection, submission of
others, and tokens
(money).
❖ Continuous Schedules
➢ Organism is
reinforced for every
response.
➢ Increases the
frequency of a
response but is an
inefficient use of the
reinforcer.
❖ Intermittent Schedules
➢ Make more efficient
use of the reinforcer
but because they
produce responses
that are more
resistant to extinction
➢ Based either on the
behavior of the
organism or on
elapsed time; they
either can be set at a
fixed rate or can vary
according to a
randomized program.
➢ Four basic
intermittent
schedules:
✓ Fixed-Ratio:
Organism is
reinforced
intermittently
 according to the o Natural Selection
number of
responses it
makes
✓ Variable-Ratio:
Reinforced after
the nth response
on the average
✓ Fixed-Interval:
Reinforced for
the first response
following a o Cultural Practices
designated
period of time.
✓ Variable-Interval:
One in which the
organism is
reinforced after
the lapse of
random or varied
periods of time
▪ Extinction o The Individual’s History of
❖ The tendency of a
previously acquired
response to become
progressively weakened
upon non-reinforcement.
❖ Operant extinction:
➢ Takes place when an
experimenter
systematically
withholds
reinforcement of a
previously learned
response until the
probability of that
response diminishes
to zero.
❖ Extinction is seldom
systematically applied to
human behavior outside
therapy or behavior
modification.
THE HUMAN ORGANISM
- According to Skinner, human behavior and
personality is shaped by three forces:
▪ Human personality is the
product of a long evolutionary
history.
▪ Individual behavior that is
reinforcing tends to be
repeated; that which is not
tends to drop out.
▪ Not every remnant of natural
selection continues to have
survival value
▪ Selection
❖ Responsible for those
cultural practices that
have survived, just as
selection plays a key role
in humans’ evolutionary
history and also with the
contingencies of
reinforcement.
Reinforcement
▪ Inner States
❖ Feelings of love, anxiety,
or fear
❖ Self-Awareness
➢ Skinner believed that
humans not only have
consciousness but
are also aware of
their consciousness;
they are not only
aware of their
environment but are
also aware of
themselves as part of
their environment
➢ They not only observe
external stimuli but
are also aware of
themselves observing
that stimuli.
➢ Behavior is a function
of the environment,
and part of that
 environment is within
one’s skin.
❖ Drives
➢ Not causes of
behavior, but merely
explanatory fictions
➢ Refer to the effects of
deprivation and
satiation and to the
corresponding
probability that the
organism will
respond.
❖ Emotions
➢ Insisted that behavior
must not be
attributed to them.
❖ Purpose and Intention
➢ Purpose and intention
exist within the skin,
but they are not
subject to direct
outside scrutiny.
- Complex Behavior
o Higher Mental Processes
▪ The most difficult of all
behaviors to analyze
▪ Thinking, problem solving, and
reminiscing are covert
behaviors that take place
within the skin but not inside
the mind.
▪ Problem solving also involves
covert behavior and often
requires the person to covertly
manipulate the relevant
variables until the correct
solution is found.
o Creativity
▪ The concept of mutation is
crucial to both natural
selection and creative
behavior.
o Unconscious Behavior
▪ Because people rarely observe
the relationship between
genetic and environmental
variables and their own
behavior, nearly all our
behavior is unconsciously
motivated
o Dreams
▪ Covert and symbolic forms of
behavior that are subject to
the same contingencies of
reinforcement as other
behaviors are
▪ Dream behavior is reinforcing
when repressed sexual or
aggressive stimuli are allowed
expression.
o Social Behavior
▪ Membership in a social group
is not always reinforcing; yet,
for at least three reasons,
some people remain a member
of a group.
❖ People may remain in a
group that abuses them
because some group
members are reinforcing
them
❖ Some people, especially
children, may not possess
the means to leave the
group
❖ Reinforcement may occur
on an intermittent
schedule so that the
abuse suffered by an
individual is intermingled
with occasional reward.
- Control of Human Behavior
o Social Control
▪ Individuals act to form social
groups because such behavior
tends to be reinforcing.
▪ Groups, in turn, exercise
control over their members by
formulating written or
unwritten laws, rules, and
customs that have physical
existence beyond the lives of
individuals.
 ▪ Variety of social forces and THE UNHEALTHY PERSONALITY
techniques, but all these can
- Counteracting Strategies
be grouped under the following
o Three basic strategies
headings: (1) operant
▪ Escape
conditioning, (2) describing
❖ People withdraw from the
contingencies, (3) deprivation
controlling agent either
and satiation, and (4) physical
physically or
restraint
psychologically
❖ Society exercises control
▪ Revolt
over its members through
❖ People who revolt against
the four principal methods
society’s controls behave
of operant conditioning:
more actively,
positive reinforcement,
counterattacking the
negative reinforcement,
controlling agent.
and the two techniques of
▪ Passive Resistance
punishment
❖ People who counteract
❖ Second technique involves
control through passive
language, usually verbal,
resistance are more subtle
to inform people of the
than those who rebel and
consequences of their not-
more irritating to the
yet-emitted behavior
controllers than those who
❖ Behavior can be controlled
rely on escape.
either by depriving people
❖ Skinner (1953) believed
or by satiating them with
that passive resistance is
reinforcers.
most likely to be used
❖ People can be controlled
where escape and revolt
through physical
have failed.
restraints, such as holding
❖ The conspicuous feature
children back from a deep
of passive resistance is
ravine or putting
stubbornness.
lawbreakers in prison.
➢ Physical restraint acts PSYCHOTHERAPY
to counter the effects - Skinner believed that psychotherapy is
of conditioning, and it one of the chief obstacles blocking
results in behavior psychology’s attempt to become scientific.
contrary to that which - The shaping of any behavior takes time,
would have been and therapeutic behavior is no exception.
emitted had the A therapist molds desirable behavior by
person not been reinforcing slightly improved changes in
restrained. behavior. The nonbehavioral therapist may
o Self-Control affect behavior accidentally or
▪ Manipulating the same unknowingly, whereas the behavioral
variables that they would use therapist attends specifically to this
in controlling someone else’s technique.
behavior, and ultimately these
variables lie outside
themselves.
 Chapter 17
ALBERT BANDURA’S SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY
ABOUT THE THEORIST
Albert Bandura
- Born on December 4, 1925 in Mundare,
Alberta
- Father from Poland and Mother came
from Ukraine
- Only boy with five older sisters
- Encouraged by his sisters to be
independent and self-reliant
OVERVIEW OF SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY
- Social cognitive theory takes chance
encounters and fortuitous events
seriously, even while recognizing that
these meetings and events do not
invariably alter one’s life path.
- Plasticity
o Humans have the flexibility to learn a
variety of behaviors in diverse
situations.
- Triadic Reciprocal Causation Model
o Includes behavioral, environmental,
and personal factors, people have
the capacity to regulate their lives.
o Two important environmental forces
in the triadic model are chance
encounters and fortuitous events.
- Agentic Perspective
o Humans have the capacity to
exercise control over the nature and
quality of their lives.
o People are the producers as well as
the products of social systems.
- Internal and External Factors
o People regulate their conduct
through them
o External factors include people’s
physical and social environments
o Internal factors include self-
observation, judgmental process,
and self-reaction
- Moral Agency
o Includes redefining the behavior,
disregarding or distorting the
consequences of their behavior,
dehumanizing or blaming the victims
of their behavior, and displacing or
diffusing responsibility for their
actions.
LEARNING
- One of the earliest and most basic
assumptions of Bandura’s social cognitive
theory is that humans are quite flexible
and capable of learning a multitude of
attitudes, skills, and behaviors and that a
good bit of those learnings are a result of
vicarious experiences.
- Observational Learning
o Allows people to learn without
performing any behavior.
o Bandura believes that observational
learning is much more efficient than
learning through direct experience.
o Modeling
▪ Involves adding and subtracting
from the observed behavior and
generalizing from one
observation to another.
▪ Involves cognitive processes and
is not simply mimicry or
imitation.
 ▪ Involves symbolically
representing information and
storing it for use at a future time
▪ Factors determine whether a
person will learn from a model in
any particular situation:
❖ The characteristics of the
model are important.
❖ The characteristics of the
TRIADIC RECIPROCAL CAUSATION
observer affect the
likelihood of modeling.
❖ The consequences of the
behavior being modeled
may have an effect on the
observer.
o Processes Gaming Observational
Learning
▪ Attention
❖ What factors regulate
attention?
➢ Frequently associate
➢ Attractive models
➢ Nature of the behavior
being modeled
▪ Representation
❖ Must be symbolically
represented in memory
❖ Symbolic representation
need not be verbal,
because some observations
are retained in imagery and
can be summoned in the
absence of the physical
model.
HUMAN AGENCY
❖ Verbal coding, however,
greatly speeds the process
of observational learning.
▪ Behavioral Production
❖ “How can I do this?”
▪ Motivation
- Enactive Learning
o Every response a person makes is
followed by some consequence.
o The consequences of a response
serve at least three functions:
▪ Response consequences inform
us of the effects of our actions.
▪ The consequences of our
responses motivate our
anticipatory behavior
▪ The consequences of responses
serve to reinforce behavior, a
function that has been firmly
documented by Skinner and
other reinforcement theorists.
- Assumes that human action is a result of
an interaction among three variables—
environment, behavior, and person
- Cognition at least partially determines
which environmental events people attend
to, what value they place on these events,
and how they organize these events for
future use.
- Cognition itself is determined, being
formed by both behavior and environment.
- "Reciprocal" to indicate a triadic
interaction of forces, not a similar or
opposite counteraction.
- Chance Encounter and Fortuitous Events
o Chance encounter
▪ “An unintended meeting of
persons unfamiliar to each
other”
o Fortuitous event
▪ An environmental experience
that is unexpected and
unintended.
o Not uncontrollable
- The essence of humanness
- Does not mean that people possess a
homunculus—that is, an autonomous
agent—making decisions that are
consistent with their view of self.
- Neither does it mean that people react
automatically to external and internal
events.
- Core Features of Human Agency
o Intentionality
▪ Acts a person performs
intentionally. An intention
 includes planning, but it also
involves actions.
o Forethought
▪ To set goals, to anticipate likely
outcomes of their actions, and
to select behaviors that will
produce desired outcomes and
avoid undesirable ones.
▪ Enables people to break free
from the constraints of their
environment.
o Self-reactiveness
▪ The process of motivating and
regulating their own actions.
o Self-reflectiveness
▪ They can also evaluate the
effect that other people’s
actions have on them.
▪ Most crucial self-reflective
mechanism is self-efficacy:
❖ Performing actions that will
SIX COROLLARIES
produce a desired effect.
- Self-Efficacy
o "People’s beliefs in their personal
efficacy influence what courses of
action they choose to pursue, how
much effort they will invest in
activities, how long they will
persevere in the face of obstacles
and failure experiences, and their
resiliency following setbacks"
o What is Self-Efficacy?
▪ “People’s beliefs in their
capability to exercise some
measure of control over their
own functioning and over
environmental events”
▪ Not the expectation of our
action’s outcomes
▪ Efficacy
❖ Refers to people’s
confidence that they have
the ability to perform
certain behaviors, whereas
an outcome expectancy
refers to one’s prediction of
the likely consequences of
that behavior
▪ Outcome must not be confused
with successful accomplishment
of an act; it refers to the
consequences of behavior, not
the completion of the act itself.
▪ Self-efficacy is not a global or
generalized concept, such as
self-esteem or self-confidence
▪ Varies from situation to situation
depending on the competencies
required for different activities
o What Contributes to Self-Efficacy?
▪ Mastery Experiences
❖ Past performances
❖ In general, successful
performance raises efficacy
expectancies; failure tends
to lower them
- First, successful performance raises self-
efficacy in proportion to the difficulty of
the task
- Second, tasks successfully accomplished
by oneself are more efficacious than those
completed with the help of others.
- Third, failure is most likely to decrease
efficacy when we know that we put forth
our best effort.
- Fourth, failure under conditions of high
emotional arousal or distress is not as
self-debilitating as failure under maximal
conditions.
- Fifth, failure prior to establishing a sense
of mastery is more detrimental to feelings
of personal efficacy than later failure.
- Sixth and related corollary is that
occasional failure has little effect on
efficacy
o Social Modeling
▪ Vicarious experiences provided
by other people.
▪ Raised when we observe the
accomplishments of another
person of equal competence,
 but is lowered when we see a
peer fail.
o Social Persuasion
▪ The effects of this source are
limited, but under proper
conditions, persuasion from
others can raise or lower self-
efficacy.
▪ The first condition is that a
person must believe the
persuader.
▪ Boosting self-efficacy through
social persuasion will be
effective only if the activity one
is being encouraged to try is
within one’s repertoire of
behavior.
o Physical and Emotional States
▪ Strong emotion ordinarily lowers
performance
SELF-REGULATION
PROXY AGENCY
- Involves indirect control over those social
conditions that affect everyday living.
- Has a downside. By relying too much on
the competence and power of others,
people may weaken their sense of
personal and collective efficacy.
- Collective Efficacy
o “People’s shared beliefs in their
collective power to produce desired
results”
o The confidence people have that
their combined efforts will bring
about group accomplishments
o Does not spring from a collective
“mind” but rather from the personal
efficacy of many individuals working
together
o Several factors that can undermine
collective efficacy:
▪ Humans live in transnational
world
❖ What happens in one part
of the globe can affect
people in other countries
▪ Recent technology that people
neither understand nor believe
that they can control may lower
their sense of collective efficacy.
▪ Complex social machinery, with
layers of bureaucracy that
prevent social change
❖ People who attempt to
change bureaucratic
structures are often
discouraged by failure or by
the long lapse of time
between their actions and
any noticeable change.
▪ Tremendous scope and
magnitude of human problems
❖ Wars, famine,
overpopulation, crime, and
natural disasters
- They reactively attempt to reduce the
discrepancies between their
accomplishments and their goal; but after
they close those discrepancies, they
proactively set newer and higher goals for
themselves.
- What processes contribute to this self-
regulation? First, people possess limited
ability to manipulate the external factors
that feed into the reciprocal interactive
paradigm. Second, people are capable of
monitoring their own behavior and
evaluating it in terms of both proximate
and distant goals. Behavior, then, stems
from a reciprocal influence of both
external and internal factors.
- External Factors in Self-Regulation
o External factors affect self-regulation
in at least two ways
▪ First, they provide us with a
standard for evaluating our own
behavior.
▪ Second, external factors
influence self-regulation by
providing the means for
reinforcement.
- Internal Factors in Self-Regulation
o Self-Observation
▪ We must be able to monitor our
own performance, even though
the attention we give to it need
not be complete or even
accurate.
o Judgmental Process
▪ Helps us regulate our behavior
through the process of cognitive
mediation.
▪ Personal standards
❖ Allow us to evaluate our
performances without
comparing them to the
conduct of others.
❖ Limited source of
evaluation. For most of our
activities, we evaluate our
performances by comparing
them to a standard of
reference.
▪ The judgmental process is also
dependent on the overall value
we place on an activity.
▪ Depends on how we judge the
causes of our behavior, that is,
performance attribution
o Self-Reaction
▪ People create incentives for
their own actions through self-
reinforcement or self-
punishment.
- Self-Regulation Through Moral Agency
o Two aspects: (1) doing no harm to
people and (2) proactively helping
people
o Self-regulatory influences are not
automatic but operate only if they are
activated, a concept Bandura calls
selective activation.
o By justifying the morality of their
actions, they can separate or
disengage themselves from the
consequences of their behavior, a
concept Bandura calls
disengagement of internal control.
▪ First, people can redefine or
reconstruct the nature of the
behavior itself
▪ Second, they can minimize,
ignore, or distort the detrimental
consequences of their behavior.
▪ Third, they can blame or
dehumanize the victim.
▪ Fourth, they can displace or
diffuse responsibility
o Redefine the Behavior
▪ People justify otherwise
reprehensible actions by a
cognitive restructuring that
allows them to minimize or
escape responsibility.
▪ First is moral justification, in
which otherwise culpable
behavior is made to seem
defensible or even noble.
▪ Second method of reducing
responsibility through redefining
wrongful behavior is to make
advantageous or palliative
comparisons between that
behavior and the even greater
atrocities committed by others.
▪ Third technique in redefining
behavior is the use of
euphemistic labels.
o Disregard or Distort the
Consequences of Behavior
▪ Bandura recognized at least
three techniques of distorting or
obscuring the detrimental
consequences of one’s actions.
▪ First, people can minimize the
consequences of their behavior
▪ Second, people can disregard or
ignore the consequences of their
actions
▪ Finally, people can distort or
misconstrue the consequences
of their actions.
o Dehumanize or Blame the Victims
o Displace or Diffuse Responsibility
▪ Displacement
 ❖ People minimize the
consequences of their
actions by placing
responsibility on an outside
source.
▪ Diffuse responsibility
❖ To spread it so thin that no
one person is responsible.
DYSFUNCTIONAL BEHAVIOR
- Depression
o High personal standards and goals
can lead to achievement and self-
satisfaction.
o Bandura believes that dysfunctional
depression can occur in any of the
three self-regulatory subfunctions:
(1) self-observation, (2) judgmental
processes, and (3) self-reactions.
THERAPY
▪ First, during self-observation,
people can misjudge their own
performance or distort their
memory of past
accomplishments
▪ Second, depressed people are
likely to make faulty judgments.
▪ Finally, the self-reactions of
depressed individuals are quite
different from those of
nondepressed persons.
- Phobias
o Fears that are strong enough and
pervasive enough to have severe
debilitating effects on one’s daily life.
o Phobias and fears are learned by
direct contact, inappropriate
generalization, and especially by
observational experiences
- Aggression
o Aggressive behavior is acquired
through observation of others, direct
experiences with positive and
negative reinforcements, training, or
instruction, and bizarre beliefs.
o Once established, people continue to
aggress for at least five reasons:
▪ (1) They enjoy inflicting injury on
the victim (positive
reinforcement)
▪ (2) They avoid or counter the
aversive consequences of
aggression by others (negative
reinforcement)
▪ (3) They receive injury or harm
for not behaving aggressively
(punishment)
▪ (4) They live up to their personal
standards of conduct by their
aggressive behavior (self-
reinforcement)
▪ (5) They observe others
receiving rewards for aggressive
acts or punishment for
nonaggressive behavior.
- The ultimate goal of social cognitive
therapy is self-regulation
- Bandura has suggested several basic
treatment approaches.
o The first includes overt or vicarious
modeling
o Second treatment mode, covert or
cognitive modeling, the therapist
trains patients to visualize models
performing fearsome behaviors.
o A third procedure, called enactive
mastery, requires patients to perform
those behaviors that previously
produced incapacitating fears.