Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionV. Learning Theories 17. Rotter and Mischel:
Cognitive Social Learning
Theory(^542) © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
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 doesin a
particular situation. What a person does includes more than actions; it includes cog-
nitive and affective qualities such as thinking, planning, feeling, and evaluating.
Cognitive-affective units include all those psychological, social, and physio-
logical 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 strate-
gies, (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
personal constructs and encoding strategies:that is, people’s ways of categorizing
information received from external stimuli. People use cognitive processes to trans-
form 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 different ways, which accounts for individual differences in personal
constructs. For example, one person may react angrily when insulted, whereas an-
other 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 ordi-
narily 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 trans-
form environmental events by focusing on selected aspects of stimulus inputs. In this
delay-of-gratification study, children exposed to pictures of rewards (snacks or pen-
nies) were able to wait longer for the rewards than were children who were encour-
aged to cognitively construct (imagine) real rewards while viewing the pictures. A
previous study (Mischel, Ebbesen, & Zeiss, 1972) had demonstrated 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 be-
liefs of what we can do, our plans and strategies for enacting behaviors, and our ex-
pectancies 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 relation-
ship to 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 selec-
tively constructor generate our own version of the real world. Thus, we acquire a set of
536 Part V Learning Theories