Chapter 18 Rotter and Mischel: Cognitive Social Learning Theory 555Cognitive-Affective Units
In 1973, Mischel proposed a set of five overlapping, relatively stable person vari-
ables that interact with the situation to determine behavior. More than 30 years of
research have caused Mischel and his associates to broaden their conception of
these variables, which they call cognitive-affective units (Mischel, 1999, 2004;
Mischel & Ayduk, 2002; Mischel & Shoda, 1995, 1998, 1999). These person
variables shifted the emphasis from what a person has (i.e., global traits) to what
a person does in a particular situation. What a person does includes more than
actions; it includes cognitive and affective qualities such as thinking, planning,
feeling, and evaluating.
Cognitive-affective units include all those psychological, social, and physi-
ological aspects of people that cause them to interact with their environment with
a relatively stable pattern of variation. These units include people’s (1) encoding
strategies, (2) competencies and self-regulatory strategies, (3) expectancies and
beliefs, (4) goals and values, and (5) affective responses.
Encoding Strategies
One important cognitive-affective unit that ultimately affects behavior is people’s per-
sonal constructs and encoding strategies: that is, people’s ways of categorizing informa-
tion received from external stimuli. People use cognitive processes to transform these
stimuli into personal constructs, including their self-concept, their view of other people,
and their way of looking at the world. Different people encode the same events in dif-
ferent ways, which accounts for individual differences in personal constructs. For exam-
ple, one person may react angrily when insulted, whereas another may choose to ignore
the same insult. In addition, the same person may encode the same event differently in
different situations. For example, a woman who ordinarily construes a telephone call from
her best friend as a pleasant experience may in one situation perceive it as a nuisance.
Stimulus inputs are substantially altered by what people selectively attend,
how they interpret their experience, and the way in which they categorize those
inputs. Mischel and former PhD student Bert Moore (1973) found that children
can transform environmental events by focusing on selected aspects of stimulus
inputs. In this delay-of-gratification study, children exposed to pictures of rewards
(snacks or pennies) were able to wait longer for the rewards than were children
who were encouraged to cognitively construct (imagine) real rewards while view-
ing the pictures. A previous study (Mischel, Ebbesen, & Zeiss, 1972) had demon-
strated that children exposed to real rewards during a wait period had more
difficulty waiting than those exposed to no reward. Results of these two studies
suggested that, in at least some situations, cognitive transformations of stimuli can
have about the same effect as actual stimuli.
Competencies and Self-Regulatory Strategies
How we behave depends in part on the potential behaviors available to us, our beliefs
of what we can do, our plans and strategies for enacting behaviors, and our expectan-
cies for success (Mischel, Cantor, & Feldman, 1996). Our beliefs in what we can do
relate to our competencies. Mischel (1990) used the term “competencies” to refer
to that vast array of information we acquire about the world and our relationship to