Critical Perspectives on Personality and Subjectivity 199Social-Cognitive Theories
Albert Bandura developed his Social-Cognitive theory of personality
in order to more adequately theorize some of the human complexity that
had been unduly truncated by Trait theory. Bandura’s main criticism of
trait theory was that it is deterministic and conceived of people as passive
and unchanging, rather than as agentic and changing. Whereas Trait
theories held, at least officially, that phenotypic traits were a result of gene-
environment interactions, Bandura introduced the new dimension of an
individual’s cognitive perception of opportunities in their environment.
While Bandura believed behavior was learned through observation and
imitation, as well as classical and operant conditioning, he also emphasized
that differences in cognition lead to the perception of different affordances
in the environment, thus introducing a third cognitive dimension to the
traditional gene-environment polarity (Dumont, 2010, p. 376). Bandura’s
cognitive dimension highlighted that the environment is not a monolithic
entity but rather contains a range of affordances that can be perceived
differently by different people, and this perception of affordances can be
altered through social learning.
ALTERNATIVE THEORIES
Theory of Personhood
As we have seen, traditional and contemporary theories of personality
are in various ways circumscribed by their cultural-historical zeitgeist and
even the minds of their progenitors. Recognizing this, some theorists have
attempted to construct broader ‘meta-theories’ of personhood that could
accommodate the cultural-historical variability of social categories
inevitably informing notions of people and personality in any given time
and place. One such attempt has been made by Jack Martin and Jeff
Sugarman (2003) in, “A Theory of Personhood for Psychology.”