Psychology2016

516 CHAPTER 13

The person brings into the situation previously reinforced responses

(personality, in other words) and mental processes such as thinking

and anticipating.

Here’s how this might work: Richard walks into a classroom

filled with other students, but no teacher is present at this time. (This

is the environment.) Part of Richard’s personal characteristics includes

the desire to have attention from other people by talking loudly and

telling jokes, which has been very rewarding to him in the past (past

reinforcements are part of his cognitive processes, or expectancies of

future rewards for his behavior). Also in the past, he has found that

he gets more attention when an authority figure is not present. His

behavior will most likely be to start talking and telling jokes, which

will continue if he gets the reaction he expects from his fellow stu-

dents. If the teacher walks in (the environment changes), his behav-

ior will change. If the other students don’t laugh, his behavior will

change. In the future, Richard might be less likely to behave in the

same way because his expectations for reward (a cognitive element of

his personal variables) are different.

One of the more important personal variables that Bandura talks

about is self-efficacy, a person’s expectancy of how effective his or her efforts to accom-

plish a goal will be in any particular circumstance (Bandura, 1998). (Self-efficacy is not

the same concept as self-esteem, which is the positive values a person places on his or her

sense of worth.)

People’s sense of self-efficacy can be high or low, depending on what has happened

in similar circumstances in the past (success or failure), what other people tell them about

their competence, and their own assessment of their abilities. For example, if Fiona has

an opportunity to write an extra-credit paper to improve her grade in psychology, she

will be more likely to do so if her self-efficacy is high: She has gotten good grades on such

papers in the past, her teachers have told her that she writes well, and she knows she

can write a good paper. According to Bandura, people high in self-efficacy are more per-

sistent and expect to succeed, whereas people low in self-efficacy expect to fail and tend

to avoid challenges (Bandura, 1998).

ROTTER’S SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY: EXPECTANCIES Julian Rotter (1966, 1978,

1981, 1990) devised a theory based on a basic principle of motivation derived from

Thorndike’s law of effect: People are motivated to seek reinforcement and avoid

punishment. He viewed personality as a relatively stable set of potential responses to

various situations. If in the past a certain way of responding led to a reinforcing or

pleasurable consequence, that way of responding would become a pattern of respond-

ing, or part of the “personality” as learning theorists see it.

One very important pattern of responding in Rotter ’s view became his

concept of locus of control, the tendency for people to assume that they either

have control or do not have control over events and consequences in their lives.

to Learning Objective 9.3. People who assume that their own actions

and decisions directly affect the consequences they experience are said to be

internal in locus of control, whereas people who assume that their lives are

more controlled by powerful others, luck, or fate are external in locus of control

(MacDonald, 1970; Rotter, 1966). Rotter associated people high in internal locus

of control with the personality characteristics of high achievement motivation

(the will to succeed in any attempted task). Those who give up too quickly or

who attribute events in their lives to external causes can fall into patterns of

learned helplessness and depression (Abramson et al., 1978, 1980; Gong-Guy &

Hammen, 1980).

Figure 13.2 Reciprocal Determinism
In Bandura’s model of reciprocal determinism, three factors influence
behavior: the environment, which consists of the physical surroundings
and the potential for reinforcement; the person (personal/cognitive char-
acteristics that have been rewarded in the past); and the behavior itself,
which may or may not be reinforced at this particular time and place.

Environment

Reinforcers

Behavior

Personal/Cognitive

Factors

Beliefs, expectancies,

personal dispositions

self-efficacy
individual’s expectancy of how
effective his or her efforts to
accomplish a goal will be in any
particular circumstance.

locus of control
the tendency for people to assume
that they either have control or do
not have control over events and
consequences in their lives.

According to Rotter, what would be the most likely form of
locus of control experienced by this young woman?