Walter Mischel's social learning theory

• TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Personality

Walter Mischel’s social learning theory presents a cognitive-social alternative to traditional personality theories. He posits that behavior is determined by a complex interaction of situational and cognitive variables and cannot be predicted from a few widely generalized traits. Consistent features in behavior result from cognitive person variables, defined as acquired and relatively stable modes of information processing.

Introduction

Psychologist Walter Mischel (1930–2018) developed a cognitive social learning approach to personality that challenges traditional theories and their central tenet that behavior can be predicted from a few widely generalized traits. In his influential book Personality and Assessment (1968), Mischel reviewed the literature on . Personality traits can be defined as a stable disposition to behave in a given way over time and across situations. Although Mischel found impressive consistencies for some attributes, such as , most behavior patterns were not consistent, even in highly similar situations. Mischel concluded that behavior is largely determined by situational variables that interact in complex ways with individual modes of information processing. Stable features in behavior result from acquired cognitive person variables (relatively stable individual differences that influence how people interact with their world).

Person Variables

Cognitive and behavioral construction competencies represent the first of the person variables. Mischel termed them “competencies” to emphasize that they represent potential—that is, what people can do rather than what they do. Referring to their “constructive” quality implies that people do not passively store but actively construct their experiences by transforming and synthesizing incoming information in novel ways. Another of these person variables involves encoding strategies and personal constructs. People encode information and classify events in personalized, unique ways. For different individuals, trait-like constructs such as intelligence or honesty may, therefore, have some overlapping features but may also have many idiosyncratic ones. This explains why two people can witness and process the same event but interpret it differently. Both people only attend to stimuli consistent with their own personal construct systems and ignore discrepant information.

Mischel maintained that besides knowing people’s potential and how they construct events, to predict behavior people must also know their expectations. One type, termed stimulus-outcome expectancies, develops when people form associations between two events and begin to expect the second event as soon as the first occurs. For example, if a child learns to associate parental frowning with being scolded or spanked, any angry face alone may soon instill anxiety.

A second type, termed response-outcome expectancies, refers to learned “if-then rules,” in which specific actions will result in certain outcomes. Outcome expectancies can have a significant influence on what people do. When expectations are inconsistent with reality, they can lead to dysfunctional behavior. Expecting relief from alcohol, when drinking actually leads to multiple problems, illustrates this point.

Subjective values—subjective values or worth that a person attributes to an object or event—are another type of person variable. In spite of holding identical outcome expectancies, people may behave differently if they do not attribute equal value to this outcome. For example, many believe that practice makes perfect, but not everyone values achievement. Furthermore, the worth of a given outcome often depends on its context. Even an avid skier might cancel a ski trip on an icy, stormy winter day.

Self-regulatory systems and plans are yet another kind of person variable. Besides being affected by external rewards and , people are capable of regulating their own behavior. They set goals and mediate self-imposed consequences, depending on whether they meet their own standards. These self-regulatory processes produce individual differences in behavior independently from the effects of extrinsically imposed conditions.

In addition, Mischel and his colleagues proposed that people also classify events based on cognitive . These are analogous to templates, and they contain only the best or most typical features of a concept. Although prototypes facilitate the classification of input information, they carry with them the danger of stereotyping. Anyone who, for example, has mistaken a female business executive for the secretary can appreciate the problem resulting from inaccurate classification.

In summary, with the concept of person variables, Mischel explained behavioral consistency and, at the same time, considered the environment as an important determinant of human actions. In psychologically strong situations, person variables play a minimal role (at a church service, for example, all people behave similarly). In psychologically weak situations (such as a cocktail party), however, individual differences are pronounced because there are no consistent cues to signal what behaviors are deemed appropriate. Therefore, whether or how much cognitive dispositions influence behavior varies with the specific situation.

Dispositional and Situational Variables

Despite a widespread tendency among people to describe themselves and others in trait-like terms (intelligent, friendly, aggressive, domineering, and so forth), research has shown that a person’s behavior cannot be predicted from a few broadly generalized personality traits. This does not mean that behavior is totally inconsistent but that dispositions alone are insufficient to explain consistency and that dispositional, as well as situational, variables need to be taken into account for a complete analysis.

To separate the effects of person and situation variables on behavior, Mischel and his colleagues conducted a series of . In one study, the experimenters assessed adolescents’ dispositions toward success or failure. Weeks later, they had them solve skill-related tasks and, regardless of their actual performance, gave one group success, a second group failure, and a third group no feedback on their performance. Then the adolescents had to choose between a less desirable reward, one for which attainment was independent of performance on similar tasks, and a preferred reward, for which attainment was performance-dependent. In both bogus feedback conditions, the situational variables had a powerful effect and completely overrode preexisting dispositions toward success or failure. Adolescents who believed they had failed the tasks more often selected the noncontingent reward, while those who believed they had succeeded chose the contingent reward. For subjects in the no-feedback condition, however, the preexisting expectancy scores were highly accurate predictors of their reward choices. This study illustrates how dispositions emerge under weak situational cues but play a trivial role when the setting provides strong cues for behavior (1973). Therefore, Mischel considered it more meaningful to analyze “behavior-contingency units” that link specific behavior patterns to those conditions in which they are likely to occur rather than looking only at behavior. In other words, instead of labeling people “aggressive,” it would be more useful to specify under what conditions these people display aggressive behaviors. Such precise specifications would guard against an oversimplified trait approach and highlight the complexities and idiosyncrasies of behavior as well as its interdependence with specific stimulus conditions.

Self-Control

Mischel and his colleagues also conducted extensive research on self-control. Their work was summarized in an article published in 1989 in the journal Science. In several experiments later termed the Stanford marshmallow experiments, the researchers attempted to clarify why some people are capable of self-regulation, at least in some areas of their lives, while others fail in such attempts. They found enduring differences in self-control as early as the preschool years. In one study, for example, they showed young children pairs of treats, one less and one more desirable (for example, two versus five cookies or one versus two marshmallows). The children were told that the experimenter would leave the room and that they could obtain the more valuable treat if they waited until they returned. They could also ring the bell to bring the experimenter back sooner, but then they would receive the lesser treat. During the fifteen-minute waiting period, the children were unobtrusively observed. Later, the children’s strategies to bridge the waiting period were analyzed. It became apparent that self-control increased when the children used behavioral or cognitive strategies to bridge the delay, such as avoiding looking at the rewards, distracting themselves with singing, playing with their fingers, or cognitively transforming the rewards (for example, thinking of marshmallows as clouds). Interestingly, a follow-up study more than ten years later revealed that those preschool children who had displayed more self-control early were socially and academically more competent, more attentive, more verbal, and better able to cope with stress than their peers as adolescents. In a related study, the length of delay time in preschool proved to be correlated with the adolescents’ SAT Reasoning Test scores, suggesting that greater self-control is related to superior academic achievement.

These studies provide an excellent illustration of how cognitive person variables can sometimes have very stable and generalized effects on behavior. The early acquisition of effective cognitive and behavioral strategies to delay gratification had a positive influence on the children’s long-term adjustment. Thus, self-control fulfills the requirements of a “personality disposition” in Mischel’s sense because it constitutes an important mediating mechanism for adaptive social behavior throughout the life cycle.

Although the examples presented above lend support to Mischel’s theory, one might argue that children’s behavior under the constraints of a research setting is artificial and may not reflect what they normally do in their natural environment. While this argument is plausible, it was not supported in a later study with six- to twelve-year-old children in a summer residential treatment facility. Observing children under naturalistic circumstances in this facility led to comparable results. Children who spontaneously used effective cognitive-attentional strategies for self-regulation showed greater self-control in delay situations and were better adjusted than their peers.

An unanswered question is how best to teach children effective information-processing skills. If these skills acquire dispositional character and influence overall adjustment, their attainment would indeed be of vital importance to healthy development. Mischel outlined his work on delayed gratification in his book, The Marshmallow Test (2014). However, later research invalidated the results of these studies and found that delayed gratification tests like the marshmallow test did not predict adult behavior.

Evolution of Research

Until the late 1960s, the field of personality psychology was dominated by trait and state theories. Their central assumption, that people have traits that produce enduring consistencies in their behavior, went unchallenged for many years. The widespread appeal of these trait assumptions notwithstanding, since the late 1960s, personality and social psychologists have been entangled in the “person-situation debate,” a controversy over whether the presumed stability in behavior might be based more on illusion than reality. While doubts about the existence of traits were already raised in the middle of the twentieth century, Mischel's work was instrumental in bringing the controversy to the forefront of academic psychology. In reviewing a voluminous body of literature, Mischel showed in 1968 that virtually all so-called trait measures, except intelligence, change substantially over time and even more dramatically across situations. Traits such as honesty, assertiveness, or attitudes toward authority typically showed across situations of 0.20 to 0.30. This means that if the correlation of behavior presumably reflecting a trait in two different situations is 0.30, less than one-tenth (0.30 0.30 = 0.09, or 9 percent) of the variability in the behavior can be attributed to the trait. Mischel, therefore, concluded that of behavioral stability, while not arbitrary, are often only weakly related to the phenomenon in question.

Functional Analysis

There is consensus that human actions show at least some degree of consistency, which is evidenced most strongly by the sense of continuity people experience in their own selves. How can people reconcile the inconsistency between their own impressions and the empirical data? Mischel’s cognitive social learning perspective presents one possible solution to this dilemma. Rather than trying to explain behavior by a few generalized traits, Mischel shifted the emphasis to a thorough examination of the relationship between behavior patterns and the context in which they occur, as the following example illustrates. Assume that parents are complaining about their child’s demanding behavior and the child’s many tantrums. After observing this behavior in various situations, a traditional personality theorist might conclude that it manifests an underlying “aggressive drive.” In contrast, a social learning theorist might seek to identify the specific conditions under which the tantrums occur and then change these conditions to see if the tantrums increase or decrease. This technique, termed “functional analysis” (as described by Mischel in 1968), systematically introduces and withdraws stimuli in the situation to examine how the behavior of interest changes as a function of situational constraints.

The controversy sparked by Mischel’s work has not been completely resolved. Few modern psychologists, however, would assume an extreme position and either argue that human actions are completely determined by traits or advocate a total situation-specificity of behavior. As with so many controversies, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

Bibliography

Lieber, Robert M., and Michael D. Spiegler. Personality: Strategies and Issues. 8th ed., Brooks, 1998.

Looti, Mohammad. "Walter Mischel." Psychological Scales, 19 Nov. 2022, scales.arabpsychology.com/2022/11/19/walter-mischel. Accessed 1 Oct. 2024.

Mischel, Harriet N., and Walter Mischel, eds. Readings in Personality. Holt, 1973.

Mischel, Walter. Personality and Assessment. 1968. Erlbaum, 1996.

Mischel, Walter. “Toward a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality.” Psychological Review 80.4 (1973): 252–83.

Mischel, Walter, et al. “Delay of Gratification in Children.” Science 244.4907 (1989): 933–38.

Olson, Matthew H., and B. R. Hergenhahn. An Introduction to Theories of Personality. 9th ed., Prentice Hall, 2020.

Plaks, Jason. The Social Psychology of Motivation. Oxford UP, 2011.

Vohs, Kathleen D., and Roy F. Baumeister. Handbook of Self-Regulation: Research, Theory, and Applications. 3rd ed., Guilford, 2018.