Free Essays on Albert Bandura

SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY of Albert Bandura If you've taken an introductory course in economics, you're already familiar with the policy planner's dilemma of deciding whether to allocate limited resources for guns or for butter. The problem is usually posed to illustrate the impersonal market forces of supply and demand, profit and loss. Yet planners are people, and most individuals come to the war-or-peace decision points of life having already developed preferred responses. Northwestern psychologist Donald Campbell calls these tendencies "acquired behavioral dispositions," and he suggests six ways that we learn to choose one option over another. 1. Trial-and-error experience is a hands-on exploration that might lead to tasting the butter and squeezing the trigger, or perhaps the other way around. 2. Perception of the object is a firsthand chance to look, admire, but don't touch a pistol and a pound of butter at close range. 3. Observation of another's response to the object is hearing a contented sigh when someone points the gun or spreads the butter on toast. It is also seeing critical frowns on faces of people who bypass the items in a store. 4. Modeling is watching someone fire the gun or melt the butter to put it on popcorn. 5. Exhortation is the National Rifle Association's plea to protect the right to bear arms or Willard Scott's commercial message urging us to use real butter. 6. Instruction about the object is a verbal description of the gun's effective range or of the number of calories in a pat of butter. Campbell claims that direct trial-and-error experience creates a deep and long-lasting acquired behavioral disposition, while perception has somewhat less effect, observation of response even less, and modeling less still. Exhortation is one of the most used but least effective means to influence attitudes or actions. Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura agrees that conversation is not an effective way of altering hum... Free Essays on Albert Bandura Free Essays on Albert Bandura SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY of Albert Bandura If you've taken an introductory course in economics, you're already familiar with the policy planner's dilemma of deciding whether to allocate limited resources for guns or for butter. The problem is usually posed to illustrate the impersonal market forces of supply and demand, profit and loss. Yet planners are people, and most individuals come to the war-or-peace decision points of life having already developed preferred responses. Northwestern psychologist Donald Campbell calls these tendencies "acquired behavioral dispositions," and he suggests six ways that we learn to choose one option over another. 1. Trial-and-error experience is a hands-on exploration that might lead to tasting the butter and squeezing the trigger, or perhaps the other way around. 2. Perception of the object is a firsthand chance to look, admire, but don't touch a pistol and a pound of butter at close range. 3. Observation of another's response to the object is hearing a contented sigh when someone points the gun or spreads the butter on toast. It is also seeing critical frowns on faces of people who bypass the items in a store. 4. Modeling is watching someone fire the gun or melt the butter to put it on popcorn. 5. Exhortation is the National Rifle Association's plea to protect the right to bear arms or Willard Scott's commercial message urging us to use real butter. 6. Instruction about the object is a verbal description of the gun's effective range or of the number of calories in a pat of butter. Campbell claims that direct trial-and-error experience creates a deep and long-lasting acquired behavioral disposition, while perception has somewhat less effect, observation of response even less, and modeling less still. Exhortation is one of the most used but least effective means to influence attitudes or actions. Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura agrees that conversation is not an effective way of altering hum...