The Impact of Social Learning Theory

Julian Rotter, Social learning theory

Background

Historical Overview

Julian Rotter was born in 1916 in Brooklyn, New York as the third son of Jewish immigrant parents (Walker, 1991). Rotter’s father had a successful business that was negatively impacted by the great depression. It was due to the great depression that Rotter became aware of social injustice and the impact of the situation environment on individuals. Rotter’s interest in psychology started when he was in high school, where he began reading books by Adler and Freud. While in Brooklyn College, Rotter attended seminars given by Adler and attended meetings of Adler’s Society of Individual Psychology held in Adler’s home. Rotter attended the University of Iowa after graduating from Brooklyn College. He took classes together with Kurt Lewin and minored in speech pathology. Rotter studied with the semanticist Wendell Johnson whose ideas had a lasting impact on Rotter’s thinking regarding the necessity for careful definitions in psychology and the innumerable pitfalls involved in poorly operationalized and defined constructs. Rotter took a clinical psychology internship at Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts after finishing his master’s degree. Rotter started his PhD at Indian University in 1939 (Walker, 1991). It was one of the few programs offering a doctorate in clinical psychology. By earning a PhD in clinical psychology, Rotter became one of the first clinical psychologists trained in what is currently considered the traditional mode.

After serving in the Army and Air Force in World War II, Rotter accepted an academic position at Ohio State University. Rotter started his major accomplishment of social learning theory at Ohio State University. The theory incorporated learning theory with personality theory. Social Learning and Clinical Psychology was published in 1954. Holding strong beliefs on how clinical psychologists should be educated, Rotter became an active participant in the 1949 Boulder Conference, which defined a training model for clinical psychologists. Rotter pushed for the training of psychologists to be done in the psychology department and not by psychiatrists. Rotter’s ideas are still influential to this date. Rotter was awarded the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution award in 1989. He died at the age of 97 on January 6, 2014.

Historical Development

The development of social learning theory was done as an attempt to combine the best elements of behaviorism and gestalt psychology. Rotter liked the theoretical and methodological rigor of behaviorists, but the mechanistic learning theories were too limited to apply to human social behavior. The gestalt theories appealed to him, especially the work of Kurt Lewin, his former professor. However, he became disturbed by their failure and imprecision to generate particular predictions. Social learning theory was seen as an alternative to behaviorism and psychoanalysis that had the potential to become useful for clinicians and researchers. Before Rotter developed his social learning theory, psychoanalysis was the dominant perspective in clinical psychology, focusing on an individual’s deep-seated instinctual motives are behavior determinants. People were seen as naïve to their unconscious impulses and needed long-term analysis of their childhood experiences during treatment. Drive theory was dominant in learning approaches of the time. Drive theory holds that individuals are motivated by physiologically based impulses that push the person to satisfy them.

The development of social learning theory departed from drive-based behaviorism and instinct-based psychoanalysis. Rotter believed there should be a psychological motivational principle in a psychological theory. The motivating factor chosen by Rotter for his social learning theory was the empirical law of effect. According to the law of effect, individuals are motivated to search for positive stimulation or reinforcement and avoid unpleasant stimulation. Rotter’s main idea in his social learning theory is that personality represents the individual’s interaction with their environment. It is impossible to speak of a personality that is internal to the person independent of their environment. Also, we cannot focus on behavior as constituting an automatic response to some objective set of environmental stimuli. Therefore, to understand behavior, we should consider the individual and their environment. Rotter saw personality and behavior as always changing. Changing how a person thinks or changing the environment, they are responding to will cause a behavior change. Rotter believed people are optimistic, and they are drawn forward by their goals to maximize their reinforcement and not merely avoid punishment.

Key Concepts

Rotter’s social learning theory model has four main components that predict behavior. These are behavior potential, expectancy, reinforcement value, and psychological situation. Behavior potential refers to various behaviors a person likely engages in. The concept indicates that people will act in certain ways, and if there are no changes, their most habitual behaviors will emerge in certain situations. Rotter looked at the probability of a person engaging in a certain behavior when faced with a certain situation. In any given situation, there will be multiple behaviors a person can engage in, and for each possible behavior, there is a likely behavior potential (Sue, 1978). According to Rotter, there is a potential behavior for any behavior (Rotter, 1990). A person will react based on their environment.

Expectancy refers to the subjective probability that a given behavior will result in a particular outcome or reinforcer (Rotter et al., 1954). The focus here is on the likelihood of a behavior leading to the desired outcome. When a person has a high or strong expectancy, they are confident their behavior will lead to the desired outcome. However, when they have low expectancies, it indicates they do not believe their behavior will lead to reinforcement. When the outcomes are equally desirable, the individual will engage in behavior with the highest expectancy. Past experience forms a person’s expectancies. When a particular behavior has led to reinforcement in the past, a person is more likely to have a high expectancy of the behavior achieving the outcome now (Williams, 2010). Rotter noted that observation of the outcomes of others’ behaviors has the potential to impact our expectancies. For example, when we see someone being punished for a certain behavior, we formulate an expectancy that the behavior will be punished even though we have not experienced the punishment. Expectancy is a subjective probability since one source of pathology is irrational expectancies. There is a possibility that there is no relationship between the individual’s subjective assessment of the likelihood of how a reinforcer will be and how it actually is. A person can either overestimate or underestimate the likelihood, and either can be potentially problematic (Rotter, 1960).

Reinforcement value pertains to the desirability of the outcomes of our behavior. We tend to give the things we want and desire a high reinforcement value and a low reinforcement value to the things we wish to avoid (Rotter, 1990). When the possibility of achieving reinforcement is equal, a person will exhibit the behavior with the desired outcome. The social environment plays a key role in shaping a person’s behavior. Social outcomes like love, rejection, or approval have a powerful influence on a person’s behavior. Reinforcement value is subjective, meaning there is a possibility that the same event can have vastly different desirability based on the person’s life experience. For example, punishment is a negative reinforcement for most children and should be avoided. However, a neglected child could give punishment a high reinforcement value since it is better than neglect.

The psychological situation is not a predictor of behavior since it refers to a variable that psychologists must keep in mind. Psychological situation posits that people will view and interpret similar situations differently. Therefore, people will view the environment depending on their subjective interpretation and not stimuli. The subjective view of the situation will determine other factors in the person’s behavior.

Theory Used Today

The theory of social learning theory that Rotter developed is used today in cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). CBT focuses on modifying cognitive distortions and their associated behaviors. Social learning theory identified that people learn how to behave based on their environment (McCullough Chavis, 2011). The analogy developed by Rotter is applied in CBT, where the goal is to modify and challenge an individual’s thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs so they can change how they react to certain behaviors in their environment. CBT combines behavioral and cognitive psychology to treat various mental health conditions (McCullough Chavis, 2011). Rotter believed that all behavior is learned. Therefore, treatment should focus on teaching new adaptive behaviors to replace the existing maladaptive behaviors. Social learning theory saw the therapist-client relationship as similar to the teacher-student relationship. When there is a warm relationship between therapist and client, the therapist has more reinforcement value. The therapist can influence the client’s behavior through praise and encouragement, similar to CBT.