Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionV. Learning Theories 17. Rotter and Mischel:
Cognitive Social Learning
Theory© The McGraw−Hill^543
Companies, 2009beliefs 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 fluctua-
tions 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 disposi-
tions. 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
adjustment and thus give social and interpersonal traits some appearance of stabil-
ity. Moreover, 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 16, we discussed Bandura’s concept of self-regulation, by which
people control their own behavior. Similarly, Mischel believes that people use self-
regulatory strategiesto control their own behavior through self-imposed goals and
self-produced consequences. People do not require external rewards and punish-
ments 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 di-
rection of those goals.
People’s self-regulatory system enables them to plan, initiate, and maintain be-
haviors even when environmental support is weak or nonexistent. People such as
Abraham Lincoln and Mohandas Gandhi were able to regulate their own behavior in
the face of a nonsupportive and hostile environment, but each of us can persist with-
out environmental encouragement if we have powerful self-produced goals and val-
ues. 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 environmental support
prevent them from achieving those goals.
Expectancies and Beliefs
Any situation presents an enormous number of behavioral potentials, but how peo-
ple behave depends on their specific expectancies and beliefsabout the conse-
quences of each of the different behavioral possibilities. Knowledge of people’s hy-
potheses 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 similar situa-
tions. For example, a college student who has never taken the GRE nevertheless has
had experience preparing for other tests. What that student does in getting ready for
the GRE is partially influenced by what previous test preparation behaviors resulted
in the most valuable outcome. A student who has previously been rewarded for using
self-relaxation techniques to prepare for tests will expect that the same techniques
Chapter 17 Rotter and Mischel: Cognitive Social Learning Theory 537