The Social Learning Theory of Albert Bandura

We analyze one of the most influential bodies of theory in social psychology.

The concept of "learner" may seem flat and nuanced, but the truth is that it has evolved a lot over time. After all, if we get philosophical, there are no easy answers to any question. What are we talking about when we talk about learning? Is mastering a skill or subject a merit of ours alone? What is the nature of the learning process and what are the agents involved?

In the West, it was customary to man as the only driving force in the learning process: the idea of man in search of theThe idea of man in search of virtue (with the permission of the corresponding deity). Then came the arrival of behavioral psychologists and they revolutionized the panorama: the human being went from being solely responsible for his own personal development to being a piece of meat enslaved by external pressures and conditioning processes.

In just a few years, we had gone from believing in naive free will to fierce determinism. Between these two opposing poles appeared a Canadian psychologist who would speak of learning in more moderate terms: Albert Bandura, the thinking mind behind the modern Social Learning Theory (SLA).

Albert Bandura's Social Learning Theory: interaction and learning

As Lev Vygotsky did, Albert Bandura also focuses the focus of his study on learning processes on the interaction between the learner and the environment. And, more specifically, between the learner and the social environment. While behavioral psychologists explained the acquisition of new skills and knowledge through a gradual approach based on several trials with reinforcement, Bandura attempted to explain why subjects who learn from each other can see their level of knowledge take a qualitative leap at once, without the need for many trials. The key is found in the word "social" which is included in the TAS.

Behaviorists, says Bandura underestimate the social dimension of behavior by reducing it to a scheme according to which one person influences another and causes association mechanisms to be triggered in the second person. This process is not interaction, but rather a sending of packets of information from one organism to another. Therefore, the Social Learning Theory proposed by Bandura includes the behavioral factor and the cognitive factor, two components without which social relationships cannot be understood.

Learning and reinforcement

On the one hand, Bandura admits that when we learn we are linked to certain processes of conditioning and positive or negative reinforcement. Likewise, he recognizes that our behavior cannot be understood if we do not take into consideration the aspects of our environment that are influencing us as external pressures, as the behaviorists would say.

Environment

Certainly, for a society to exist, however small it may be, there must be a context, there has to be a contexta space in which all its members exist. In turn, this space conditions us to a greater or lesser degree by the simple fact that we are inserted in it.

It's hard to disagree with this: it's impossible to imagine a soccer player learning to play on his own, in a big vacuum. The player will refine his technique by seeing not only what is the best way to score goals, but also by reading the reactions of his teammates, the referee and even the crowd. In fact, he probably would not even have taken an interest in the sport if he had not been pushed into it by social pressure. Often it is others who set part of our learning objectives.

The cognitive factor

However, Bandura reminds us, the other side of the Social Learning Theory coin must also be taken into account: the cognitive factor. The learner is not a passive subject who dispassionately attends the ceremony of his or her learning, but actively participates in the process and even expects things from this stage of training: he or she has expectations. In an interpersonal learning context we are able to foresee the novel results of our actions (rightly or wrongly), and therefore we are not totally dependent on conditioning, which is based on repetition. That is: we are able to transform our experiences into original acts in anticipation of a future situation that has never occurred before.

Thanks to psychological processes that behaviorists have not bothered to study, we use our continuous input of data of all kinds to make a qualitative leap forward and imagine future situations that have not yet occurred.

Vicarious learning

The pinnacle of the social aspect is vicarious learning remarked by Bandura, in which an organism is capable of extracting lessons from the observation of what another organism does. Thus, we are able to learn by doing something that is difficult to measure in a laboratory: the observation (and attention) with which we follow someone's adventures. Remember the controversies that periodically break out over whether or not children should watch certain movies or television series? They are not an isolated case: many adults find it tempting to participate in Reality Shows by weighing the pros and cons of what happens to the contestants of the latest edition.

Note: a mnemonic trick to remember the vicarious learning that Bandura talks about is to frijarse in the snakes or "projections" that come out of the eyes of the gentleman in the video clip Vicarious, in which many eyes and many strange things also appear.

A middle ground

In short, Bandura uses his Social Learning Theory model to remind us that, as learners in continuous training, our private and unpredictable psychological processes are important. However, although they are secret and belong to us alone, these psychological processes have an origin that is, in part, social. It is precisely because of our ability to see ourselves in the behavior of others that we can decide what works and what does not work. decide what works and what does not work..

Moreover, these elements of learning serve to build the personality of each individual:

• "Albert Bandura's Theory of Personality".

We are able to foresee things from what happens to others, just as living in a social environment makes us set certain learning objectives and not others.

As far as our role as apprentices is concerned, it is clear: we are neither self-sufficient gods nor automatons..