Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionV. Learning Theories 16. Bandura: Social
Cognitive Theory(^484) © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
P
eople often have their life path permanently altered by unexpected meetings with
others or by unplanned happenings. These chance encounters and fortuitous
events frequently determine whom people marry, what career they pursue, where
they live, and how they will live their lives.
Many years ago, a young graduate student named Al had a chance encounter
that altered the course of his life. One Sunday, Al, who was usually a conscientious
student, became bored with an uninteresting reading assignment and decided that a
round of golf was preferable to tackling schoolwork. Al checked with a friend, and
the two young men headed to the golf course. However, they arrived too late to make
their tee time and therefore were bumped to a later time slot. By chance, this male
twosome found themselves playing behind two slower-playing female golfers.
Rather than “playing through,” the two men joined the two women and the two two-
somes became one foursome. Thus, a boring reading chore and a delayed tee-off
time put two people together who otherwise would never have met. By this series of
chance events, Albert Bandura and Ginny (Virginia) Varns met in a sand trap on a
golf course. The couple eventually married and had two daughters, Mary and Carol,
who like most of us, were the products of a chance encounter.
Chance encounters and fortuitous events have been largely ignored by most
personality theorists, even though most of us recognize that we have had unplanned
experiences that have greatly changed our lives.
Overview of Social Cognitive Theory
Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theorytakes chance encounters and fortuitous
events seriously, even while recognizing that these meetings and events do not in-
variably alter one’s life path. How we react to an expected meeting or event is usu-
ally more powerful than the event itself.
Social cognitive theory rests on several basic assumptions. First, the outstand-
ing characteristic of humans is plasticity;that is, humans have the flexibility to learn
a variety of behaviors in diverse situations. Bandura agrees with Skinner (Chapter
15) that people can and do learn through direct experience, but he places much more
emphasis on vicarious learning, that is, learning by observing others. Bandura also
stresses the idea that reinforcement can be vicarious; people can be reinforced by ob-
serving another person receive a reward. This indirect reinforcement accounts for a
good bit of human learning.
Second, through a triadic reciprocal causation modelthat includes behavioral,
environment, and personal factors, people have the capacity to regulate their lives.
Humans can transform transitory events into relatively consistent ways of evaluating
and regulating their social and cultural environments. Without this capacity, people
would merely react to sensory experiences and would lack the capacity to anticipate
events, create new ideas, or use internal standards to evaluate present experiences.
Two important environmental forces in the triadic model are chance encountersand
fortuitous events.
Third, social cognitive theory takes an agentic perspective,meaning that hu-
mans have the capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of their lives.
People are the producers as well as the products of social systems. An important
478 Part V Learning Theories