Julian Rotter's Social Learning Theory and Locus of Control

Historical Background and Development of Social Learning Theory

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 through this experience that Rotter became aware of social injustice and the impact of the situational environment on individuals. Rotter's interest in psychology began in high school when he started reading works by Adler and Freud. While at Brooklyn College, he attended seminars given by Adler and participated in meetings of Adler's Society of Individual Psychology held in Adler's home.

After graduating from Brooklyn College, Rotter attended the University of Iowa, where he took classes with 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 regarding the necessity for careful definitions in psychology and the pitfalls involved in poorly operationalized constructs. Rotter completed a clinical psychology internship at Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts after finishing his master's degree, then began his PhD at Indiana University in 1939 (Walker, 1991). It was one of the few programs at the time offering a doctorate in clinical psychology. By earning that 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 developing his major accomplishment: social learning theory. The theory incorporated learning theory with personality theory, and its foundational text, Social Learning and Clinical Psychology, was published in 1954. Holding strong beliefs about how clinical psychologists should be trained, Rotter became an active participant in the 1949 Boulder Conference, which defined a training model for clinical psychologists. He pushed for the training of psychologists to be conducted within psychology departments rather than by psychiatrists. Rotter was awarded the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution award in 1989 and died at the age of 97 on January 6, 2014.

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

Before Rotter developed his theory, psychoanalysis was the dominant perspective in clinical psychology, viewing an individual's deep-seated instinctual motives as the primary determinants of behavior. People were seen as unaware of their unconscious impulses and in need of long-term analysis of childhood experiences during treatment. Drive theory was similarly dominant in learning approaches of the era, holding that individuals are motivated by physiologically based impulses that push them to seek satisfaction.

Rotter's social learning theory departed from both drive-based behaviorism and instinct-based psychoanalysis. He believed a psychological theory required a psychological — rather than biological — motivational principle. The motivating factor he chose was the empirical law of effect: individuals are motivated to seek positive stimulation or reinforcement and to avoid unpleasant stimuli. His central idea was that personality represents the individual's interaction with their environment. It is impossible to speak of a personality internal to the person that is independent of their environment; equally, we cannot treat behavior as an automatic response to an objective set of environmental stimuli. Rotter saw personality and behavior as always subject to change: altering how a person thinks, or altering the environment they are responding to, will produce behavioral change. He also believed people are optimistic and drawn forward by goals aimed at maximizing reinforcement rather than merely avoiding punishment.

Key Concepts of Rotter's Social Learning Theory

Rotter's social learning theory model contains four main components that 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. The concept indicates that people will act in certain habitual ways in certain situations if conditions remain unchanged. Rotter examined the probability of a person engaging in a specific behavior when faced with a specific situation. In any given situation, multiple behaviors are possible, and each carries a corresponding behavior potential (Sue, 1978). According to Rotter (1990), there is a potential behavior for every behavior — a person will react based on their environment.

Expectancy refers to the subjective probability that a given behavior will lead to a particular outcome or reinforcer (Rotter et al., 1954). The focus is on how likely a person believes their behavior will produce the desired result. When a person holds a high or strong expectancy, they are confident their behavior will lead to the desired outcome; when they hold low expectancies, they doubt their behavior will produce reinforcement. When outcomes are equally desirable, the individual will choose the behavior with the highest expectancy. Past experience shapes expectancies: when a behavior has led to reinforcement previously, a person is more likely to hold a high expectancy that it will do so again (Williams, 2010). Rotter also noted that observing the outcomes of others' behaviors can influence our expectancies — for example, seeing someone punished for a behavior leads us to expect punishment for that behavior, even without personal experience. Expectancy is described as subjective because one source of psychological pathology is irrational expectancies, where a person's subjective assessment of a reinforcer's likelihood diverges significantly from reality (Rotter, 1960).

Reinforcement value pertains to the desirability of the outcomes of our behavior. We assign high reinforcement value to outcomes we desire and low reinforcement value to outcomes we wish to avoid (Rotter, 1990). When the likelihood of achieving reinforcement is equal across options, a person will choose the behavior leading to the most desired outcome. Social outcomes — such as love, approval, or rejection — exert a powerful influence on behavior. Reinforcement value is subjective: the same event can hold vastly different desirability for different people depending on their life experiences. For example, while punishment is a negative reinforcement for most children, a neglected child might assign punishment a high reinforcement value because it is preferable to being ignored entirely.

Psychological situation is not a direct predictor of behavior but rather a variable that psychologists must keep in mind. It posits that people will view and interpret similar situations differently based on their subjective experience. The individual's subjective interpretation of the situation will therefore influence all other factors in determining their behavior.

Application to Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

The social learning theory Rotter developed is applied 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 Rotter developed 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 situations 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 existing maladaptive ones. Social learning theory conceived of the therapist-client relationship as similar to the teacher-student relationship: when a warm relationship exists between therapist and client, the therapist gains greater reinforcement value and can more effectively influence the client's behavior through praise and encouragement — paralleling CBT practice.

Rotter noted that behavior is maladaptive because a person did not learn healthy behaviors (Proctor & Niemeyer, 2020). The therapist therefore works to suggest new behaviors that help the client develop more effective coping skills. CBT employs the same strategy, teaching clients new behaviors to replace negative or unhealthy ones. Since social learning theory holds that personality constitutes a person's interaction with their environment, a change in how a person thinks or in their environment will produce a behavioral change — which is precisely the goal of CBT treatment.