W. W. Norton & Company | The Personality Puzzle, 4th ed.

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Chapter 15: How the World Creates Who You Are: Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory

Behaviorism's key tenet is that all of behavior stems from the rewards and punishments in past and present environments.

The philosophical roots of behaviorism include empiricism, a belief that all knowledge comes from experience; associationism, a belief that paired stimuli will come to be experienced as one; hedonism, the belief that the goal of life is "gentle pleasure"; and utilitarianism, the belief that the best society creates the most happiness for the most people. In behaviorist terminology, learning is any change in behavior that results from experience.

The basic principles of learning include habituation, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning affects emotions, feelings, and physiological responses; operant conditioning affects behavior and how one "operates" in one's environment.

Punishment is a useful technique of operant conditioning if it is applied correctly, which it almost never is.

Dollard and Miller's social learning theory explains motivation as the result of primary and secondary drives, aggression as the result of frustration, and psychological conflict as the result of the interplay of motivations to approach and avoid a goal.
Rotter's social learning theory emphasizes how expectancies of reward can be more important determinants of behavior than reward itself.

Bandura's social learning theory focuses on how individuals' expectancies about their own behavioral capacities affect what they will attempt to do. His theory also develops a detailed analysis of observational learning, in which one learns by watching the behaviors and outcomes of others, and reciprocal determinism, in which one's actions are determined by a self system that originates in the environment, then changes the environment, which in turn affects the self system.

Mischel's cognitive social learning theory describes distinctive individual difference variables including construction competencies and encoding strategies. The theory culminates in an if . . . then model of personality that describes how a person responds distinctively to each situation he or she encounters.

Learning approaches to personality have epitomized objective research, drawn necessary attention to the influence of the environment on behavior, and yielded a useful technology of behavioral change. However, they may underestimate the importance of individual differences.

The history of the learning approaches comes full circle in an interesting and even ironic way, in which aspects of the original S-R theory of John Watson have reemerged in the if . . . then approach of Walter Mischel.