Albert Bandura- Social Learning

With this article i intend to expand my knowledge about social learning process according to Albert Bandura and share essential information to understand one of the most used processes by human beings.

For Bandura, human beings are very flexible and able to learn a lot of concepts, attitudes, skills and behaviors, not only through direct experience but also through observing the experiences of other people. According to the author through observation we can learn without having to perform an action when observing the movements of others. According to Bandura Social Learning is sometimes more efficient than learning by direct experience, he argues that if we only learned through direct experience our repertoire of knowledge was very scarce. Modeling learning, learning from a model, is not a mere imitation, modeling happens on full time, it is through modeling that we learn to perform useful or valued behavior by society, but we also learn not to follow inappropriate or useless behaviors, modeling is performed through observation. Important factors: we model people with high status or powerful or competent in an area of our interest; the model to be followed is usually someone who is above. Modeling is learning to do or learning not to do following a model.

According to Bandura there are 4 factors that govern social learning (by observation):-Attention; - Retention; -Reproduction; -Motivation;

Before modeling someone we need to focus our attention on that person, the types of behavior to be modeled is also important because we focus more on what we consider important, interesting or valuable. The information apprehended during observation needs to be retained in memory, all representations (visual; auditory, etc … all sensory representations), as well as their meanings and senses and need to be available so that they can be activated in relevant situations, including being mentally rehearsing in order to decide when and how to put them into practice After observation and retention, it is necessary to reproduce / repeat the behavior, then the cognitive representations are converted into actions, to reproduce a new behavior, we ask ourselves if we are executing in the right way while we are familiar with it motivation makes observational learning more effective, any performance is always facilitated when there is motivation. The Social Learning Theory tries to explain how people acquire skills, values and behavioral styles, but it also explains how people motivate themselves and regulate their behavior.

Triadic Reciprocity: -Person (cognitive processes); Environment; Behavior (triangulation of variables that are dependent on and influence each other. If people are persuaded (with reinforcements + motivation )they have what it takes to achieve the proposed goals, they are more comfortable and are able to overcome doubts and problems that may arise. Self-efficacy is our belief in having the capacity to perform an intended action, whether we act or not act according to the level of our self-efficacy.

Our brain does not react to the world using past experiences, it predicts and builds our experience in the world, the way we detect emotions in others is deeply rooted in predictions. Our brain comes with circuits programmed for some feelings, simple feelings that come from the physiology of our body, when we are born we can create feelings like calm and agitation, excitement, comfort, discomfort, but these feelings are not emotions are present at all times our lives, are simple summaries of what happens in our body that regulate us. In order to deal with these feelings, the predictions connect the sensations of our body and allow us to feel what is happening around us and consequently act in a certain way. Sometimes these constructions made by predictions can be emotions, these emotions do not happen to us by chance, they are built by us. Our brain is a circuit so if we change the ingredients that the brain uses to create emotions then we can transform our emotional lives. If we change those ingredients today, we are teaching our brain to predict differently tomorrow, “we are the architects of our own experience”. Control emotions is more of a learning process that may seem complicated at first but with motivation and practice it becomes an automatic process. More control means more responsibility, if we have more control over our emotional system than what we thought, who is responsible when we misbehave? The answer is ourselves, Albert Bandura showed us how the human being is able to create moral disengagements to justify actions considered negative.