Social Cognitive and Behavioral Drinking

Social Cognitive, Behavioral Drinking Social Cognitive/behavioralist Drinking Drinking behavior provides informative demonstration of how social cognitive and behavioralist theories provide complementary rather than competing explanations of human agency. Bandura (1999) casts social cognitive theory against various determinist and materialist theories on the assertion humans are "sentient agents of experiences rather than simply undergoers of experiences" because people explore, manipulate and influence the environment they discover (p. 4). This contrasts against "automaticity," habit, "tendencies to repeat responses given a stable supporting context" (Oullette and Wood, 1998, p. 55).

Oullette & Wood (1998) compare habit learning to skill development, where practice can lead to "nonvolitional, frequent, and consistent experiences in a given context" but new situations require deliberation (p. 55). Wood and Neal (2007) largely reiterate this summary as repeated learned behavior (843). The present inquiry is particularly interested in how and why particular behaviors become repeated after negative consequences have been demonstrated possible, and thus the behavior carries risk.

If unpleasant consequences become probable or the only option, psychology could contribute explanation as to why individuals repeat costly and unpleasant / dis-satisfying behavior patterns. This applies particularly to new drinkers because they don't have a prior source of reference yet. They may have heard about or know people who have suffered consequences from drinking too much but this is secondary experience and many more people do not suffer consequences so by definition a new drinker does not have first-hand negative experience.

This core epistemological constraint of not knowing what one does not know, requires they must have heard about it somewhere, decided that was what they wanted, and then actively taken steps toward that rather than just considering it, in a social-cognitive behaviorist reading.

If that is not or perhaps can not be the case, what then is the potential drinker looking for, if agents "construct thoughts about future courses of action to suit ever changing situations, assess their likely functional value, organize and deploy strategically the selected options and evaluate the adequacy of their thinking based on the effects their actions produce" (Bandura, 1999, p.

5), but cannot assess the functional value of something they have not experienced yet? Therefore habit entails either an initial desire for perceived benefits or a first accidental, "fortuitous" (Bandura, 1999, p. 11) experience, which then become perpetuated through agent-environment reciprocity. If the first experience was unpleasant some personalities may crave those as second-best substitutes. Therefore habit begins when pleasurable and for some even negative consequences result from some fortuitous fact-finding incident. Bandura (and thus social cognitive behaviorism, largely) calls this "triadic reciprocal causation" (1999, p.

5), where agents encounter, select and create different aspects of their environment rather than simply respond to unidirectional external stimuli (determinism). Consensus generally accepts belonging as a plausible possible motivator for the functionally similar population 'new / young drinkers aged around twenty,' for which my example provides a potential case study. Other plausible justifications include stress relief and desire for new or reinforcing situations but if a drinker is new then there can be no reinforcement without an initial precedential experience.

With new drinkers (who match the case), belonging becomes associated with contextual factors and so those come to represent or become associated with factors that transmit successful belonging satisfaction (Oullette & Wood, 1998, p. 835). This process leads to nonvolitional (habit) response, particularly if the increasing probability of negative consequences resulting from a growing sample of experiences reduces the intensity of belonging reward.

Thus occurs a transference from specific individuals onto the settings and referentiality of the once-pleasurable experience and, as substitutes were necessarily pursued less often given the exclusive social drinking time, there would be fewer competing sources of dwindling reinforcement. Therefore the environmental elements associated with belonging reinforcement, replace the behavioral reward and drinking becomes habitual rather than the object of a cognitive cost/benefit evaluation.

If the action arises without deliberate cognition, say through perceived lack of alternatives, then association transfers to the action rather than the outcome and so becomes automated. Unintentional behavior however says very little about the reasons individuals perpetuate risky or costly actions. Description alone delivers little utility beyond telling us "[m]ost of the time what we do is what we do most of the time" (Townsend & Bever, qtd. In Wood & Neal, 2007, p. 843).

The product is that either people repeat habitual behavior, which is a tautology / circular definition of habit, or they have no way to cognitively act toward that which they have no reference for, and thus neither of these theories explains the initial precedential experience, which Bandura refers to as fortuitous (ibid.). Either the initial experience is positive, accidental and rewarding, or accidental and negative where the agent accepted positive unpleasant reinforcement in lieu of desired best-choice rewards.

Only after some prior exposure satisfying either of these motivations, could cognition deliberately seek repetition to achieve want fulfillment, and only after a second event at least, become habitual, if a single episode is not enough to determine patternality. The result seems to be a continuum, from intentionality (social cognition) through habituation / automaticism, and ultimately to transference. At least in my case the observed behavior demonstrated characteristics of the first two at the same time, and resulted in the third, so such overlap can occur.

I initially discovered belonging reward drinking with older friends through fortuitous exposure, which led to cognitive environmental manipulation toward repetition, but when those individuals went away, the behavior became transferred to the environment and thus habitual, where drinking equated to, facilitated or replaced belonging satisfaction even among strangers. The conclusion thus becomes a question if, how and why positive unpleasant and increasingly negative satisfaction-seeking behaviors persist if the rewards become so weak that eventually even habit is rejected.

Ultimately neither of these theories describes behavior and its motivation exclusively, both of them apply in.