Social Learning Concepts - Assignment Example

? ICAL CONDITIONING, OPERANT CONDITIONING AND SOCIAL LEARNING REPRESENT A DIVERSE SET OF INFLUENCES ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR Date CLASSICAL CONDITIONING, OPERANT CONDITIONING AND SOCIAL LEARNING REPRESENT A DIVERSE SET OF INFLUENCES ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR Learning is referred to as a relatively permanent change in behavior resulting out of experience. During the first half of the twentieth century, behaviorism rose to dominate psychology and sought to explain the learning process. Behavioral school of thought classify learning into three major types; classical conditioning, operant conditioning and observational learning (Alberto, 2003, pg 76). A learning process in which an association is made between a previously neutral stimulus and a stimulus that naturally evokes a response is called Classical Conditioning (Argyris, 1976, pg 91). For example, in Pavlov's classic experiment, the smell of food was the naturally occurring stimulus which was paired with the previously neutral ringing of the bell. Once an association is developed between the two, the sound of the bell alone could lead to a response. Operant conditioning is a learning process in which reward or punishment increases or decreases the probability of response. The underlying idea behind operant conditioning is that the voluntary behavior is shaped by the consequences of our actions. The social learning theory proposed by Albert Bandura rooted in many of the basic concepts of traditional learning theory; Bandura believed that all types of learning cannot be accounted by only. Bandura was of the mindset that people can learn new information and behaviors by watching other people. There are three core concepts which form the heart of social learning theory; observation, intrinsic reinforcement and learning does not necessarily bring change in behavior. For more than 100 years, classical and operant conditioning has been a major part of psychology. While classical and operant conditioning sound like very different methods applied to very distinct responses (reflexes vs. voluntary action), the fact is that both are implicated in almost every real life activity. One responds classically to many stimuli in his environment all the time, and many operant response tendencies (serving many purposes) constantly pushes one in different directions. A feared or distressing object (rat or whining child) classically arouses an emotional reaction prompting you to shun the stressful stimulus. Thus, one may operantly escape the fear or pacify the irritating child, which is followed by relief (negative reinforcement). Unfortunately, also because of the reinforcement, one learns to slavishly cater to the child because the child cries a lot. Emotional-reflexive responses and behavioral-voluntary responses are all mixed up and are just two parts of our bodies. Pavlov, Thorndike, Skinner, etc. who initiated these concepts were looking for the basic elements and laws of learning (changing or adapting) that might explain all behavior. But, they observed very limited parts of behavior in detail. As we see that when Pavlov strapped his dogs into his apparatus exclusive of operant behavior he wasn't likely to learn much about the reinforcement of voluntary action. Similarly Skinner also only looked at automatic recordings of bar pressing; he didn't even notice how the animal pressed the bar (e.g. left paw, both paws, nose, or body block). The rats in the Skinner box were clearly salivating just like Pavlov's dogs, but it wasn't measured and neither was any other emotional, physiological, brain function, or reflexive reactions (e.g. frustration, urination, blood pressure, muscle potential, EEG, licking the bar, etc.). Human mind is complex and behavior would be easier to understand if one disregards the mind, but that isn't reality. Including the mind in psychology is just common-sense to. In our daily lives it seems as though the way we mentally control our actions. We plan to call a friend or go out for shopping and we do. We decide to control our diet and we eat less. Fishbein (1980) asserted that people act according to their intentions. If plans, self-instructions, and other thoughts do affect peoples’ actions, then one needs to know how to control our thoughts too. The connection between the conditioned stimulus (tone or rat) and the unconditioned stimulus (food or loud noise) must make sense and be useful, otherwise an animal or human won't be able to learn that connection. For example: An adult would certainly start to salivate to a bell (or smell of a bakery) indicating that food is nearby. But a 4-year-old most likely wouldn't develop a fear of a little kitten under the same conditions as Little Albert with the rat (Bandura, 1977, pg 209). Adults know kittens don't make banging noises. Even "lower organisms" have an idea about what is most presumably to make them sick for instance relate eating or drinking something with nausea much faster than a stimulus with nausea. Thus the research demonstrates that animals and humans aren't brainless they are thinking and adjusting and they just don't learn any useless pairing of two stimuli but only when it is very useful though one-trial learning can occur. The classically conditioned stimuli must truly predict the unconditioned stimuli before the animal will learn the connection thus helping the animal be alerted and to adapt. Similarly, the reinforcement must truly be in sync with the behavior before operant learning occurs. The learner is drawn in a complex cognitive process of calculating the relationships between environmental stimuli and behavioral reactions. The organism is figuring cognitive maps as in what is going on, what causes what or what leads to what. However it is erroneous to assume that our thoughts affecting what we learn are always correct and just. There is extraordinary evidence that humans have a remarkable tendency to swiftly learn to be prejudiced and mean towards people who are seen as different. Many wrong things are easy to learn like degrading others, however, can be rewarding and thus different parts of the brain have to check the rationality of other parts. According to Tolman, the organism's purposes and expectations seem to be important. Suppose a dog has learned to jump out of a shock box at the sound of a tone to avoid the shock. But if the shock is turned off than after many, many jumps to the tone without receiving any shock the dog shall stop jumping, but he won’t. Perhaps because the dog expects to evade shock by jumping which happens every time and this in turn confirms and reinforces the expectation. Similar expectations may be implicated in useless human compulsions, obsessions, and worries. For example, if one avoids talking to black men then one will never learn to interact with and trust black men (Biggie, 1964, pg 39). Thinking has become a major part of psychology in the last few decades. It is another important yet complex part of life like behavior. While the supremacy of behaviorism gained immense deal of attention and productive research, it began to look that classical and operant conditioning remained insufficient in explaining the behavior of humans (Bruner, 1990, pg 73). This urges researchers to question the idea that only external reinforcement play a role in the actions of an individual therefore they began to observe the internal aspects such as attitudes, beliefs, and thoughts. The findings shore up the idea that humans develop responses to certain stimuli that are unnaturally occurring. If we touch a hot stove our reflex pulls our hand back. This happens instinctually and no learning involved (Burns, 1995, pg 205). Many of the behaviors today are shaped by the coupling of stimuli, such as the smell of a perfume, a song, any specific day of the year, results in fairly intense emotions. Its not that the smell or the song are the cause of the emotion, but rather what that smell or song has been coupled with may be an ex-boyfriend, death of a loved one, or so on. Humans make these links all the time and often don’t realize the power that these associations have (Comer, 2004, pg 198)  This new approach marked a transition away from strict behaviorism and towards a concept known as social learning theory.  With this researchers began to identify the fact that people sometimes demonstrate a behavior without any external reward or reinforcement (Dembo, 1994, pg 112).  Julian Rotter, the most well known theorist to challenge strict behaviorism, believed that humans are more complex than lower animals and thus pure behaviorism cannot go far enough in explaining the complex human behaviors.  According to Rotter, people do not engage in behaviors merely for the reward but because of Behavior Potential. Behavior Potential can be defines as an expectancy to be rewarded and the value of the potential reward.  In other words, the possibility of a person to act in a definite manner is determined by both how much one expects to be rewarded for that behavior and how much the reward is worth to him (Brophy, 1990, pg 34). For example, playing the lottery has a minimal expectancy of reward for most people.  However, the value of the reward is so high that people get engage in this behavior. Similarly if one knows that he enjoys baseball he would be more likely to engage in a neighborhood softball game even though he has never played the game before (Davis, 1980, pg 127). Neubauer (1990) describe identical twins raised apart from birth who were more or less identically fixated with order and cleanliness. Both had dressed perfectly, arrived exactly on time, and scrubbed their hands until they turn red and raw (Newby, 1993, pg 89). When asked why, one persuasively explained that it’s because his mother was a demanding perfectionist and the other said with assurance that it’s because my mother was a totally lazy boned (Sorcher, 1974 pg 64). This shows that our genes work secretly. Species have progress differently in terms of how rapidly certain things are learned, e.g. rats speedily learn to fear a rubber hedgehog, birds impulsively fear large predator birds, humans tend to fear speaking in groups, etc. References: Alberto, P. and Troutman, A.C. (2003) Applied behavioral Analysis for Teachers (6th ed) Upper Saddler River, NJ: Merrill, Prentice Hall Argyris, C. (1976) Increased leadership effectiveness. New York; Wiley Argyris, C. (1978) Organizational Learning: A Theory of action perspective. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company (Schon, D.A) Argyris, C. (1993) On organizational Learning, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Bandura, A. (1969). Principles of Behavior Modification, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Bandura, A. (1976) "Effective Change through Participant Modeling", In J.D. Krumboltz and C.E Thoresen (Eds), Counseling Methods, New York: Holt, Rinehart andWinston Bandura, A. (1977) Social Learning Theory. New Jersey, Prentice Hall Inc. Belkin, G.S. and Gray, J.L. (1977) Educational Psychology: An Introduction. Dubuque Iowawm. C. Brown Publishers Bender, A.K., Cunningham, D, Duffy, T.M. and Perry, J.P. (1995) Theory into practice: How do we link? In G. J. Anglin (Ed), Instructional technology: past, present and future (2nd Ed.) Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited. Bigge, M.L. (1964) Learning Theories of Teachers: New York, Harper and Row Bruner, J. (1986) Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Bruner, J. (1990), Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Burns, R. (1995) The Adult learner at work, Business and professional Publishing, Sydney. CIPD (2005) Learning Styles, Fact sheet, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, London. Comer, R. J. (2004) Abnormal Psychology (5th ed); Worth Publishers, New York. Davis, T.W. and Luthans, F.A. (1980) “A social Learning Approach to Organization Behavior”, Academy of management Review 5, 281-90 Dembo, M.H. (1994), Applying educational; psychology (5th edition), White Plains, NY: Longman Publishing Group Ertner, P.A. and Newby, T.J. (1993) “Behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism: Comparing critical features from an instructional design perspective” Performance Improvement quarterly, 6(4), 50-70 Good, T.L, and Brophy, J.E. (1990) Educational Psychology: A realistic approach (4th Ed) White Plains, NY: Longman Goldstein, A.P. and Sorcher, M. (1974). Changing Supervisor Behavior, New York, Pergamon. Read More