Bandura’s Social Learning Theory Argumentative Essay Example

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In a curiosity to understand why people, specifically children, behave the way they do, numerous theories have come up over the years that explain their behavior. With an understanding of their behavior patterns in different situations were we able to understand their learning abilities. Bandura’s social learning theory is one of the many such theories dealing with the learning abilities of children. Albert Bandura, in his social learning theory (1977), emphasizes on the process of observation as a way of learning behavior from the environment. His theory began as an attempt to mold the stimulus-response theory into an explanation of human behavior. He believed that the children are active processors of information and work on the relationship between their behavior and its consequences. Unless the cognition is at work, observational learning cannot take place (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961).
In the context of understanding the development of learning capabilities of children, various influential models, such as parents, teachers, friends, and characters on TV, surround them. The children identify with the models around them and pick up the behavior patterns, values, attitudes, beliefs, and actions of the person they identify with. They pay attention to these behavior patterns, and try to imitate what they have observed. If the children imitate the behavior of the people around them and are rewarded in return, they are more likely to continue repeating the same behavior. The behavior pattern is reinforced in the children this way (Bandura, 1977).
However, there exist many theories that are doing rounds in contrast to the Social Learning Theory. Watson’s Classical Conditioning Theory and Skinner’s Operant Conditioning are two such doctrines. John Watson proposed and stressed that the process of classical conditioning can explain all the aspects of child behavior and psychology, completely denying the existence of a consciousness/mind and its role in learning patterns. Skinner’s theory was not as strict, acknowledging the existence of consciousness, however took away its due credit in the process of acquiring new behavior or knowledge. Bandura’s theory, in contrast to both of these theories, emphasized that in the moments of making decision, children are more likely to behave instinctively rather than focusing on deciding what is the expected or right action.
Watson conceptualized that everything in a child, ranging from speech to the emotional reactions to a situation, is a pattern of stimulus and its response. This theory dealt with acquiring of a new behavior via association process. According to this theory, two stimuli link together to form a new response in an animal or a person. If a response that is generated on the knowledge that has been acquired previously, no new learning has been acquired. Skinner, who was less restrictive in his doctrine, believed in the existence of mind and consciousness, but stressed that it was much easier and more productive to learn from observation of external behavior, rather than internal mental processes. He believed that looking at the causes of an action and its consequences was the best way to understand a behavioral pattern. This approach went on to be called as operant conditioning. On the other hand, Bandura contradicted these theories by saying that a child will not be able to learn anything new if he does not pay conscious attention to the external behavior (behavior of the people around him). Therefore, consciousness plays a major role in learning patterns and acquisition of new knowledge and behavior patterns by children (Bandura, Grusec, & Menlove, 1967).
While Watson and Skinner’s theories stress on the importance of learning from the environment, they are hugely restrictive and limiting in a sense that they describe behavior only in terms of either nature or nurture. Watson’s model breaks down the human behavior into smaller units of stimulus-response. This hugely underestimates and reduces the complexity of the human behavior and psychology. Bandura’s model, on the other hand, emphasizes on the power of memory and inner mental processes more than the external environment. He stresses that simply acquiring a new behavior or knowledge will do no good, if a child will not be able to retain its memory. Long-term retention of the activities and their consequences will help the child form/alter their actions. According to Bandura’s theory, a child forms memories by creating visuals and symbols in his mind (Coelho & Purkis, 2009).
Another criticism of Watson and Skinner’s theories is that they are deterministic in nature. They leave no scope for freewill of the individual. Watson’s theory focused on the behavior of the children, and ignored their consciousness. He believed that practice can strengthen any kind of learning in children and all the differences in them were the result of different learning patterns acquired. A child, as an individual, was believed to have no control over his reaction that he has learned from classical conditioning, e.g. in the case of phobias (Coelho & Purkis, 2009). It highly underestimates the uniqueness of the humans and their freewill to make their own decisions and create their own identity. Skinner’s theory also failed to account for the role of inherited and cognitive factors of acquiring and learning new behavior, and thus, is incomplete and inaccurate explanation of the learning process of children. Many modern day scientists have also outright rejected Skinner and Watson’s models, because they directly contradict with the Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Darwin’s theory believes that humans are continuously improving themselves over time in order to better suit their environment, which means exercising complete right over their freewill, something which these theories outright deny. However, Bandura, in his theory, again walks away from these concepts. He stresses enough on the role of the child’s intelligence in the learning process. He believes that the symbolic representations that the child forms for creating memories guide and direct its actions. To achieve the reproduction of the behavior, the child has to put together the responses he picked up according to the behavioral patterns. A good learner can easily integrate these sets of responses to produce new patterns of behavior, ones that he may not even have observed before.
Watson and Skinner, both have been unable to explain the development of human languages. The conditioning models failed to explain the complex behaviors of language and memory in children. This has drawn enough critics to finally discard the theories. Bandura’s Social Learning Theory has proved to be a beneficial alternative to these theories in order to explain behaviorism in children. Further studies went on to reveal that the humans solve problems through their insight rather than a trial and error learning approach. Enhancing the Skinner’s theory, Bandura suggested that the children are adept at learning through observation automatically, rather than through personal experiences or trial and error approaches. Bandura’s theory clearly decodes and thrives on the understanding of complex human behavior, rather than generalizing patterns. If a child imitating the behavior is getting aptly rewarded and approved from parents and other influential people around, it classifies for external reinforcement. Gaining external approval makes the child happy about it being approved, which reinforces the behavior internally. The child’s focus will also be on what happens to other people when behaving in a certain way, while picking up the behavior. This is vicarious reinforcement. It offers an extremely useful way of organizing existing data and a framework for the future research as well.
In Bandura’s theory, it was reinforced that the responses of the people are automatically and unconsciously strengthened by their following consequences. On the basis of this feedback of consequences, people develop hypotheses about the types of behavior patterns that are most likely to succeed, which then serve as guide for future actions (Bandura, & Jeffery, 1971). The learning will hardly or never be rightly activated if the behavioral reproduction is not positively received. When positive rewards and incentives are provided, a child receives enough motivation to convert the observational learning into actions. Correct hypotheses and thoughts lead to successful actions, while inaccurate ones cause erroneous performances. In this analysis of learning by experience, reinforcing results help them understand what actions they must perform in order to achieve beneficial outcomes and avoid the unfavorable ones. A child’s sharp cognitive skills enable him to profit extensively from experience (Bandura, 1971). Though, cognition was completely ignored in the Conditioning models. Those theories revolved around the nature and the environment’s role in the learning, and avoided to focus its direction on the mental and emotional intelligence of a child.
The main jest of Watson’s theory is based on learning by trial-and-error. He said that associating an activity with an experience can term that activity as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for a child and it will decide whether the child will repeat the activity or not. On the other hand, Skinner believed that more productive learning comes to children by observing the models around them, i.e. parents, friends, family, etc. However, they failed to account for the complex structure of human understanding, which they could only explain as a simple stimulus-response model (Norton & Price, 2007). The scientists who support the reductionist approach emphasize that this tends to make the model more scientific. Breaking down the complex behavior patterns into smaller units makes it easy to test and validate them scientifically. They ended up generalizing the basic behavior pattern of every child this way. However, it lacks validity and leads to incomplete explanations. Bandura, on the other hand, considered every child as a unique individual and focused on every layer of a child’s intelligence and personality to completely decode his learning pattern. He gave enough attention to the fact that every child is bound to react differently in similar situations; a child is bound to react differently to same situation under different circumstances.
It is clear from all these points that the conditioning theories, though started some amazing discussions in the field of learning behavior patterns, failed to focus on some very important aspects of learning by children. They failed to analyze and explain the role of brain in the learning process. Bandura’s theory easily handles these holes and inconsistencies in the conditioning theories. It connects the various social and cognitive angles and draws an accurate picture that clearly explains the process of how a behavior is picked up and learned by the children. It emphasizes that the children learn in a social context; when the environment of a child changes, there is bound to be a change in his behavior. Unlike Watson and Skinner’s conditioning models, Bandura’s theory stresses that there are multiple ways of learning, which are flexible and vary from child to child. Children can learn either through direct experiences, or by observation. Keeping all these points in consideration and by gaining a deeper understanding of these theories, one can safely conclude that Bandura’s theory of social learning is the closest to the real world situations and can be easily administered.

References

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