Julian Rotter's Social Learning Theory: Key Concepts

Introduction and Historical Overview

Julian Rotter was born in 1916 in Brooklyn, New York, as the third son of Jewish immigrant parents (Walker, 1991). His father had a successful business that was negatively impacted by the Great Depression. It was through the hardships of the Depression that Rotter became acutely aware of social injustice and the influence of situational environments on individuals. Rotter's interest in psychology began in high school, where he started reading books by Adler and Freud. While attending Brooklyn College, he attended seminars given by Adler and participated in meetings of Adler's Society of Individual Psychology, held at Adler's home.

After graduating from Brooklyn College, Rotter enrolled at the University of Iowa, where he took classes alongside Kurt Lewin and minored in speech pathology. He also studied with the semanticist Wendell Johnson, whose ideas had a lasting impact on Rotter's thinking about the necessity for careful definitions in psychology and the many pitfalls involved in poorly operationalized constructs. Following the completion of his master's degree, Rotter undertook a clinical psychology internship at Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts. He began his PhD at Indiana University in 1939 (Walker, 1991), which was one of the few programs offering a doctorate in clinical psychology at the time. By earning this degree, 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 during World War II, Rotter accepted an academic position at Ohio State University, where he began his major work on social learning theory. This theory incorporated learning theory with personality theory, and the resulting volume, Social Learning and Clinical Psychology, was published in 1954. Holding strong beliefs about how clinical psychologists should be educated, Rotter became an active participant in the 1949 Boulder Conference, which defined a training model for clinical psychologists. He advocated that psychologists be trained within psychology departments rather than by psychiatrists — a position whose influence continues to be felt today. Rotter received the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1989. He died on January 6, 2014, at the age of 97.

Historical Development of Social Learning Theory

The development of social learning theory represented an attempt to combine the best elements of behaviorism and gestalt psychology. Rotter appreciated the theoretical and methodological rigor of behaviorists, but found their mechanistic learning theories too limited to account for human social behavior. The gestalt theories, particularly the work of his former professor Kurt Lewin, appealed to him as well; however, he was troubled by their imprecision and their failure to generate specific predictions. Social learning theory was conceived as an alternative to both behaviorism and psychoanalysis — one with the potential to be useful for clinicians and researchers alike.

Before Rotter developed his social learning theory, psychoanalysis was the dominant perspective in clinical psychology. It focused on an individual's deep-seated instinctual motives as the primary determinants of behavior, and it held that people were largely unaware of their unconscious impulses. Treatment required long-term analysis of childhood experiences. Meanwhile, drive theory dominated learning approaches of the era, positing that individuals are motivated by physiologically based impulses that compel them to seek satisfaction.

Rotter's social learning theory departed from both drive-based behaviorism and instinct-based psychoanalysis. He believed that a psychological theory should include a psychological — rather than physiological — motivational principle. The motivating factor he chose was the empirical law of effect: the idea that individuals are motivated to seek positive stimulation or reinforcement and to avoid unpleasant stimulation. Rotter's central claim was that personality represents an individual's interaction with their environment. It is impossible to speak of personality as something purely internal and independent of environment, but equally inadequate to view behavior as an automatic response to objective environmental stimuli. To understand behavior, both the individual and the environment must be considered together. Rotter viewed personality and behavior as always in flux — changing how a person thinks, or changing the environment they are responding to, will produce a change in behavior. He also believed people are essentially optimistic, drawn forward by their goals to maximize reinforcement rather than merely to avoid punishment.

Key Concepts of the Social Learning Theory Model

Rotter's social learning theory model contains four main components that together predict behavior: behavior potential, expectancy, reinforcement value, and psychological situation.

Behavior potential refers to the range of behaviors a person is likely to engage in within a given situation. The concept indicates that people tend to act in characteristic ways, and that — absent changes — their most habitual behaviors will emerge under familiar conditions. Rotter examined the probability of a person engaging in a particular behavior when faced with a particular situation. In any given situation, multiple behaviors are possible, and each carries its own behavior potential (Sue, 1978). According to Rotter (1990), there is a behavior potential for any behavior; 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 concept focuses on the likelihood that a behavior will lead to the desired outcome. When a person holds a high or strong expectancy, they are confident their behavior will produce the desired result. When expectancies are low, the person does not believe their behavior will lead to reinforcement. When outcomes are equally desirable, the individual will engage in the behavior with the highest expectancy. Past experience shapes expectancies: when a particular behavior has led to reinforcement before, a person is more likely to hold a high expectancy that it will do so again (Williams, 2010). Rotter noted that observing the outcomes of others' behaviors can also influence one's own expectancies. For example, when we see someone punished for a certain behavior, we form an expectancy that the behavior will be punished — even though we have not experienced the punishment ourselves. Expectancy is described as a subjective probability because one source of pathology is irrational expectancy. There may be no correspondence between a person's subjective estimate of the likelihood of a reinforcer and the actual likelihood. A person can overestimate or underestimate this likelihood, and either error can be problematic (Rotter, 1960).

Reinforcement value pertains to the desirability of the outcomes of our behavior. We assign high reinforcement value to things we want and desire, and low reinforcement value to things we wish to avoid (Rotter, 1990). When the possibility of achieving reinforcement is equal, a person will exhibit the behavior whose outcome is most desired. The social environment plays a key role in shaping a person's reinforcement values. Social outcomes such as love, rejection, or approval exert a powerful influence on behavior. Reinforcement value is subjective, meaning the same event can carry vastly different desirability depending on a person's life experience. For example, punishment functions as a negative reinforcer for most children and is something to be avoided. However, a neglected child might assign punishment a high reinforcement value, since even negative attention is preferable to neglect.

Psychological situation is not itself a direct predictor of behavior; rather, it is a variable that psychologists must bear in mind. This concept holds that people view and interpret similar situations differently. Therefore, people respond to their subjective interpretation of the environment rather than to objective stimuli. This subjective view of the situation shapes all other factors in the person's behavioral response.

References

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Proctor, K. R., & Niemeyer, R. E. (2020). Retrofitting social learning theory with contemporary understandings of learning and memory derived from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Journal of Criminal Justice, 66, 101655. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcrimjus.2019.101655

Rotter, J. B. (1960). Some implications of a social learning theory for the prediction of goal directed behavior from testing procedures. Psychological Review, 67(5), 301. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0039601

Rotter, J. B. (1990). Internal versus external control of reinforcement: A case history of a variable. American Psychologist, 45(4), 489. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.45.4.489

Rotter, J. B., Fitzgerald, B. J., & Joyce, J. N. (1954). A comparison of some objective measures of expectancy. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49(1), 111. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0059837

Sue, D. W. (1978). Eliminating cultural oppression in counseling: Toward a general theory. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 25(5), 419. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.25.5.419

Walker, C. (1991). The history of clinical psychology in autobiography, Vol. 1. Thomson Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.

Williams, D. M. (2010). Outcome expectancy and self-efficacy: Theoretical implications of an unresolved contradiction. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(4), 417–425.