Walter Mischel

Cognitive Social Learning Theory

RECONCEPTUALIZATION
Biography of Mischel
 Born in Vienna in Feb 22,1930
 Second son of upper-middle-class parents
 He grew up in a pleasant environment only a short
distance from Freud's home.
 When the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938, his family
left for the U.S.
 Received his PhD from Ohio State University in
1956, where he worked under Rotter
 Published Personality and Assessment in 1968
 Has taught at Colorado, Harvard, Stanford, and
Columbia, where he remains as an active
researcher
 Contribution in
Personality Psychology
Consistency Paradox
 In 1968, in his classic monograph “Personality and
Assessment” he criticized “trait theory” explanation
of behavior and explained that empirical data
suggest much variability in the behavior.
 He argued that traits are weak predictor of
performance in a variety of situations.
 He called his Re conceptualized view as META
theory, which has bridged competing approaches as
two sides of one system.
 Although both laypeople and professionals tend to
believe that behavior is quite consistent, research
suggests that it is not.
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.
He said that personality often changes to a
given situation.
Example

 Supposewe want to assess the happiness of

Camila, an introvert and Ema, an extrovert.
 According to trait-situation interaction, we
cannot predict who will be happier unless
we know something about the situations
they are in.
 Camila
may be happier when in the library
whereas Ema is happier in the party.
Mischel view was called situationism.
Today, most psychologist in the field
of personality including Mischel are,
Interactionist. i.e behavior is the out
come of both trait and situation.
Cognitive-Affective Personality System
 Behavior Prediction
 Individuals should behave differently as situations vary
 Situation Variables
 All those stimuli that people attend to in a given situation
 Cognitive-Affective Units
 Encoding strategies
 Competencies and self-regulatory strategies
 Expectancies and beliefs
 Goals and values
 Affective responses
 Related Research

 Locus of Control and Holocaust Heroes

 Midlarsky et al. (2005)
 Heroes had a higher internal locus of control
 Person-Situation Interaction
 Kammrath et al. (2005)
 The average person understands that, depending on their
personality, people adjust their behavior to match the situation
 Mendoza-Denton et al. (2001)
 Conditional and interactionist self-evaluations buffer negative
reactions to failure
 The social-cognitive interactionist conceptualization is more
appropriate than traditional “decontextualized” views of
personality
There are five main variable that contribute to the theory
are used in predicting how a person will most likely behave.

 1. Competencies is our intellectual as well as social

skills.
 2.Cognitive strategies is the different perceptions of a
specific event.
 3.Expectancies is what is expected of the behaviors
that come to be in the mind.
 4.Subjective Values is the possible outcome of various
behaviors.
 5.Self- regulatory systems is the rules and standards
that people regulate in their behavior. 
The social- cognitive
perspective on personality is a
theory that emphasizes
cognitive processes, such as
thinking and judging, in the
development of personality.
Mischel suggests that an
individual’s behavior is
fundamentally dependent on
situational cues; this counters
the trait theories’ perspective
that behavior is dependent upon
traits and should be consistent
across diverse situations.
One of Mischel’s most notable
contributions to personality
psychology are his ideas on self-
regulation, as demonstrated in
his famous Stanford
marshmallow experiment on
delayed gratification.
The Marshmallow Test

 C:\Users\andes\Downloads\The Marshmallow Test.mp4