2.

3 Behavioral & Social

Cognitive Theories
By:
SINDHU MATHI SELVAN

2.3.1 Selman’s Perspective Taking

2.3.2 Skinner’s Operant Conditioning
2.3.3 Bandura’s Social Cognitive
 2.3.1 SELMANS
PERSPECTIVE-TAKING
 BIOGRAPHY

• Robert Selman was born in 1942 in

California.
• He is mostly known for his theories and
books developed to talk about self
socialization and perspective.
• There are not many records on Selman’s
history.
• His books were published and his
theories are well known but his personal
life is kept secret.
• Past work focused on the treatment of
Very young children don't understand that other
people have different feelings and experiences from
their own. But this perspective-taking ability develops
over time until it is quite sophisticated
in adults. Robert Selman, a psychoanalyst, developed a
five-stage model to describe the development of
perspective-taking. 

Consider the following:

Holly is an 8-year old girl who likes to climb trees. She

is the best tree climber in the neighbourhood. One day
while climbing a tree she falls off the
bottom branch but does not hurt herself.
Her father sees her fall, and is upset. He asks her
to promise not to climb trees anymore, and Holly
promises. 
If children of different ages are presented with
this situation and asked such questions as, "If
Holly climbs the tree, should she be punished?"

"Will her father understand if she climbs the tree?"

"Will Sean understand why Holly has trouble
deciding what to do?" the children will
give answers relevant to their age group: 
Social Societ
Undiffer Self Third
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entiated ive
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 UNDIFFERENTIATED PERSPECTIVE-TAKING

Level 1 - Age: 3-6

Description: Children recognize that the self and

others can have different thoughts and feelings, but
they frequently confuse the two.

Response: The child predicts that Holly will save the

kitten because she does not want it to get hurt and
believes that Holly's father will feel just as she does
about her climbing the tree: "Happy, he likes kittens."
 SOCIAL INFORMATIONAL
PERSPECTIVE TALKING

Level 2 - Age: 5-9

Description: Children understand that

different perspectives may result because
people have access to
different information.

Response: When asked how Holly's father

will react when he finds out that she
climbed the tree, the child responds, "If he
didn't know anything about the kitten, he
 SELF REFLECTIVE
PERSPECTIVE TAKING

Level 3 - Age: 7-12

Description: Children can "step in another

person's shoes" and view their own thoughts,
feelings, and behaviour from the other person's
perspective. They also recognize that others can do
the same.

Response: When asked whether Holly thinks she will

be punished, the child says, "No. Holly knows that her
father will understand why she climbed the tree."
This response assumes that Holly's point of view
is influenced by her father being able to "step in her
shoes" and understand why she saved the kitten.
 THIRD PARTY PERSPECTIVE
TAKING
Level 4 - Age: 10-15

Description: Children can step outside a two-

person situation and imagine how the self and
other are viewed from the point of view of
a third, impartial party. 

Response: When asked whether Holly should be

punished, the child says, "No, because Holly
thought it was important to save the kitten. But
she also knows that her father told her not to
climb the tree. So she'd only think she shouldn't
be punished if she could get her father to
understand why she had to climb the tree."
 SOCIEATAL PERSPECTIVE
TAKING

Level 5 - Age: 14-Adult

Description: Individuals understand that

third-party perspective-taking can
be influenced by one or more systems
of larger societal values.

Response: When asked if Holly should be

punished, the individual responds, "No.
The value
of human treatment of animals justifies Hol
 FURTHER INFORMATION

As children mature, they take

more information into account.
They realize that different people can react
differently to the same situation.
They develop the ability to analyze the
perspectives of several people involved in a
situation from the viewpoint of
an objective bystander, and they can even imagine
how different cultural or social values would
influence the perceptions of the bystander.
 EXAMPLE

1. When dealing with younger children in stages 2 or 3

you could often have them respond to the emotions of
a character when they are reading book.
2. The teacher can pause periodically and have students
respond to the questions such as “ how do you think
the character feels now that this has happened to
them?”
3. As children get older they mature and take different
perspectives on what knowledge they are taking in. It
is job of the teacher to make sure all children are on
the appropriate level of perspective taking by giving
them the proper assignmens and reading to determine
their level.
4. On any level of perspective taking it is always possible
to ask the student “what would you do in this
2.3.2 SKINNER’S OPERANT
CONDITIONING
 B.F SKINNER

Lived 1904-1990.
Influential American
psychologist considered
to be one of the founders
of behaviorism (along
with Watson and Pavlov).
He identified the
principles behind operant
conditioning, and was the
first to study the
behavioral effects of
 OPERANT CONDITIONING

A method of learning that occurs through

reinforcements and punishments for
behavior. We learn to perform certain
behaviors more often because they result in
rewards, and learn to avoid other
behaviors because they result in punishment
or adverse consequences.
 Negative and positive
experiences shape our future
behavior choices, even if we
 Reinforcement: results that make
us want to repeat a behavior.
Studied hard?
Good grades are
positive
reinforcement.
Didn’t study?
Bad grades are
positive
punishment.

Punishment: results that make us

NOT want to repeat a behavior again.
 THE SKINNER BOX

Skinner’s operant conditioning chamber

(alsocalled a Skinner Box) was designed to
teach rats how to push a lever. This
behavior is not natural to rats, so operant
conditioning with positive and negative
reinforcement were performed in order to
teach the behavior.

Positive
Reinforcement:
A rat was awarded
with food when he
pressed the lever.
Negative
 POSITIVE
REINFORCEMENT

• Initially, the rat’s

behavior was
random. It
accidentally tripped
• the lever and a food
pellet was
released.
The rat soon
• discovered that
intentionally
pressing the lever
resulted in a
reward.
The consequence of
 NEGATIVE
REINFORCEMENT

• An unpleasant
electric current
ran through the
• floor of
the rat’s
cage.
• Initially, accidental
lever pushing
turned off the
electriccurrent.
The consequence of
avoiding something
painful (removal of
an unpleasant
Positive Reinforcement
Reinforcement = Do it again!
Positive = Adding something
(good)
Negative
Reinforcement
Reinforcement = Do it again!
Negative = Taking something
(bad) away
Positive Punishment
Punishment = Don’t do it
again!
Positive = Adding
something (bad)
Negative Punishment
Punishment = Don’t do it
again!
Negative = Taking something
(good) away
 POSITIVE

Positive punishment and reinforcement are easier

to remember.
Positive does not mean “good” - it means
something is added
 NEGATIVE

Negative punishment and reinforcement are

more challenging to understand because the
term “negative reinforcement” is used
outside of Psychology to mean the opposite of
“positive reinforcement.”

In Psychology, “negative” does not mean

“bad”: it means something is removed from
your environment. If something good is
removed, it will make you sad and cause you to
not want to repeat the behavior that led to its
removal. If something bad is removed, it will
make you happy, causing you to want to repeat
2.3.3 BANDURA’S SOCIAL
COGNITIVE
 BIOGRAPHY
• Albert Bandura was born in Alberta,
Canada 1925.
• Interested in behaviorist learning theories.
• During high school summer he worked in
the Alaskan Yukon which he credits for his
interests, psychopathology.
• Completed Masters and Ph.D. in three years.
• Professor at Stanford University since 1953.
• Author of over 300 scholarly publications.
 His early work on  Later on, Bandura focused
learning was grounded on cognitive factors such as
in the behavioral beliefs, self-perceptions,
and expectations, his
principles of
theory is now called Social
reinforcement and Cognitive Theory.
punishment, but he
added a focus on  Social Cognitive Theory
learning from expands social learning
observing others. theory to include
 This was labeled Social cognitive factors.
Learning Theory.
 THINK !!!
 Does the violence that children observe on
television, movies, and video games lead
them to behave aggressively?

 This is a hot question today, but it was also of

great interest years ago when Bandura led
an experiment to determine how kids learn
aggression through observation.
 In a famous and influential experiment known as
the Bobo doll experiment, Albert Bandura and
his colleagues were able to demonstrate one of
the ways in which children learn aggression.


The experiment involved exposing children to
two different adult models; an aggressive model
and a non-aggressive one.

After witnessing the adult's behavior, the
children would then be placed in a room without
the model and were observed to see if they
would imitate the behavior they had witnessed
earlier.
Bobo doll experiment:
• Adults were recorded being
aggressive to bobo dolls.
• Children were shown the
video and then allow to play
in a room full of toys.
• Children were aggressive to
the bobo doll just as the
adults were in the video
(Cherry, 2014).
• Through his research,
Bandura observed that
components of learning occur
though observation and
modeling behaviors.
• This concept led to the
theoretical framework of the
social cognitive learning
theory (Famous People Info,
2011).
 RESULTS

Children exposed to the violent model tended to imitate the exact

behavior they had observed when the adult was no longer present.
Bandura and his colleagues had also predicted that children in the non-
aggressive group would behave less aggressively than those in the control
group.

The researchers were also correct in their prediction that boys would behave
more aggressively than girls. Boys engaged in more than twice as many acts
of aggression than the girls.
 ASSUMPTIONS OF SOCIAL COGNITIVE
THEORY
• Learning occurs by observing
others and modeling.
• Internal processes and
cognition of observed behavior
may or may not lead to a learned
behavior ( learning performance
distinction).
• Behavior is goal directed- goals are
set and behavior is directed to
accomplishing the goal (motivation
driven) .
• Behavior is eventually
self- regulated.
• Punishment and
reinforcement have indirect
effects on the learning process
(Hurst, 2014).
 RECIPROCAL CAUSATION MODEL
ENVIRONMENT LEARNING BEHAVIOR PERSON

Environmental
factors: Social
Environment models
Instruction
Feedback
Learning
Personal
factors:
Behavior Person (cognitive)
Goals Sense of
Behaviors: Process of self-regulation Goal
efficacy
progress Motivations Learning (Zimmerman,
Attributions
1989).
 TYPES OF LEARNING

• Enactive Learning-
learning by doing and
is reinforced by the
consequences of
actions/outcomes.

• Vicarious Learning-
learning through
observation not
performance (Hurst,
2014).
 THE LEARNING PROCESS

• Attention- Learning by being attentive. Anything that distracts the

attention will going to have a negative effect on learning. If the
situation is far likely to the interest, the more the learner dedicate
his full attention to learn.
• Retention- The ability to store information is also important part of
the learning process. This can be affected by a number of factors,
but the ability to pull up information later and act on its vital
observation.
• Reproduction-Once person pays attention and able to retain the
information, it is time to actually perform the behavior you
observed. Further practice of the learned behavior leads to
improvement and skill advancement.
• Motivation-In order to be successful, you have to be motivated to
learn being aware of it outcome. Reinforcement and punishment
play an important role in motivation.
 SOCIAL COGNITIVE THEORY

• Models can be real

people (teachers,
coaches etc.)
• Models can also come
from media: books,
TV, Magazines
(symbolic)
• Models can
influence behavior:
positively or
negatively (Schunk,
2012).
 CHARACTERISTICS OF
MODELS

Both real and

symbolic, have:
• Have prestige and
power
• Models are

competent
• Perform tasks
well that others
would like to be
able to do (Hurst,
2014).
1. Direct Reinforcement - occurs when you perform a
certain behaviour and are rewarded
(positive reinforcement), or it leads to the
removal or avoidance of something unpleasant
(negative reinforcement).
2. Vicarious Reinforcement – the observer may simply
see others reinforced for a particular behavior
and then increase his or her production of that
behavior.

3. Self-Reinforcement – or controlling your own
reinforcers.

This reinforcement is important for both
students
and teachers.
We want our students to improve not because it
 WEAKNESS OF
THEORY

• The theory is loosely structured.

• Doesn’t take emotional responses
into account.
• Ignores biological differences between
individuals –genetic factors
• Assumes that all behavior is a result
of modeling, not genetics, illness, or
other influences (Flamand, 2014).
THANK YOU