556 Part VI Learning-Cognitive Theories
it. By observing our own behaviors and those of others, we learn what we can do
in a particular situation as well as what we cannot do. Mischel agreed with Bandura
that we do not attend to all stimuli in our environment; rather, we selectively con-
struct or generate our own version of the real world. Thus, we acquire a set of beliefs
about our performance capabilities, often in the absence of actual performance. For
example, an outstanding student may believe that she has the competence to do well
on the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) even though she has never taken that test.
Cognitive competencies, such as doing well on the GRE, are generally more
stable temporally and cross-situationally than other cognitive-affective units are. That
is, people’s scores on mental ability tests do not ordinarily show large fluctuations
from one time to the next or from one situation to another. In fact, Mischel (1990)
has argued that one of the reasons for the apparent consistency of traits is the relative
stability of intelligence, a basic trait that underlies many personal dispositions. He
contended that cognitive competencies, as measured by traditional mental ability
tests, have proven to be some of the best predictors of social and interpersonal adjust-
ment and thus give social and interpersonal traits some appearance of stability. More-
over, Mischel suggested that when intelligence is assessed by nontraditional measures
that include a person’s potential for seeing alternate solutions to problems, it accounts
for even larger portions of the consistency found in other traits.
In Chapter 17, we discussed Bandura’s concept of self-regulation, by which
people control their own behavior. Similarly, Mischel believes that people use
self-regulatory strategies to control their own behavior through self-imposed
goals and self-produced consequences. People do not require external rewards and
punishments to shape their behavior; they can set goals for themselves and then
reward or criticize themselves contingent upon whether their behavior moves them
in the direction of those goals.
People’s self-regulatory system enables them to plan, initiate, and maintain
behaviors even when environmental support is weak or nonexistent. People such
as Abraham Lincoln and Mohandas Gandhi were able to regulate their own behav-
ior in the face of a nonsupportive and hostile environment, but each of us can
persist without environmental encouragement if we have powerful self-produced
goals and values. However, inappropriate goals and ineffective strategies increase
anxiety and lead to failure. For example, people with inflexible, exaggerated goals
may persist in trying to realize those goals, but their lack of competence and envi-
ronmental support prevent them from achieving those goals.Expectancies and Beliefs
Any situation presents an enormous number of behavioral potentials, but how
people behave depends on their specific expectancies and beliefs about the conse-
quences of each of the different behavioral possibilities. Knowledge of people’s
hypotheses or beliefs concerning the outcome of any situation is a better predictor
of behavior than is knowledge of their ability to perform (Mischel et al., 2002).
From previous experience and by observing others, people learn to enact
those behaviors that they expect will result in the most subjectively valued outcome.
When people have no information about what they can expect from a behavior,
they will enact those behaviors that received the greatest reinforcement in past