Chapter 17 Bandura: Social Cognitive Theory 495P
eople often have their life path permanently altered by unexpected meetings
with others or by unplanned happenings. These chance encounters and fortu-
itous events frequently determine whom people marry, what career they pursue,
where they live, and how they will live their lives.
Many years ago, a young graduate student named Al had a chance encounter
that altered the course of his life. One Sunday, Al, who was usually a conscientious
student, became bored with an uninteresting reading assignment and decided that a
round of golf was preferable to tackling schoolwork. Al checked with a friend, and
the two young men headed to the golf course. However, they arrived too late to
make their tee time and therefore were bumped to a later time slot. By chance, this
male twosome found themselves playing behind two slower-playing female golfers.
Rather than “playing through,” the two men joined the two women and the two
twosomes became one foursome. Thus, a boring reading chore and a delayed tee-off
time put two people together who otherwise would never have met. By this series
of chance events, Albert Bandura and Ginny (Virginia) Varns met in a sand trap
on a golf course. The couple eventually married and had two daughters, Mary and
Carol, who like most of us, were the products of a chance encounter.
Chance encounters and fortuitous events have been largely ignored by most
personality theorists, even though most of us recognize that we have had unplanned
experiences that have greatly changed our lives.
Overview of Social Cognitive Theory
Albert Bandura’s 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. How we react to an expected meeting or event is
usually more powerful than the event itself.
Social cognitive theory rests on several basic assumptions. First, the out-
standing characteristic of humans is plasticity; that is, humans have the flexibility
to learn a variety of behaviors in diverse situations. Bandura agrees with Skinner
(Chapter 16) that people can and do learn through direct experience, but he places
much more emphasis on vicarious learning, that is, learning by observing others.
Bandura also stresses the idea that reinforcement can be vicarious; people can be
reinforced by observing another person receive a reward. This indirect reinforce-
ment accounts for a good bit of human learning.
Second, through a triadic reciprocal causation model that includes behav-
ioral, environmental, and personal factors, people have the capacity to regulate
their lives. Humans can transform transitory events into relatively consistent ways
of evaluating and regulating their social and cultural environments. Without this
capacity, people would merely react to sensory experiences and would lack the
capacity to anticipate events, create new ideas, or use internal standards to evalu-
ate present experiences. Two important environmental forces in the triadic model
are chance encounters and fortuitous events.
Third, social cognitive theory takes an agentic perspective, meaning that
humans have the capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of their
lives. People are the producers as well as the products of social systems. An