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Learning Through Observation, Modeling and Self-Efficacy
Abnormal Psychology · Chapter 5: Behavioral and Learning Models of AbnormalitySection 5.3 · lesson 21 of 9711 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Where the strict behavioral model begins to give way.
- Describe observational learning and its four component processes
- Explain vicarious reinforcement and vicarious punishment
- Define self-efficacy and identify its four sources
- Explain why admitting expectancy as a cause changes the model
Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,595 words). Read along, or search it.
Behavioral and Learning Models of Abnormality
Learning Through Observation and Perceived Capability
Two facts sit awkwardly with the model as we have it so far. First, if every behavior had to be learned by doing it, that would take a lifetime. Second, many people with a well-defined fear have never had a bad experience with it. This section supplies the missing route. Learning by watching. One note first. This material is educational, and is not a basis for diagnosis. Then vicarious consequences, and the three pathways to acquiring a fear. Then self-efficacy, which is a belief about capability, and its four sources. And along the way, the behavioral model quietly changes shape. Because expectancies get admitted as causes, which the strict model excluded by design.
The Gap
Two Facts Direct Conditioning Cannot Absorb
Start with how much learning direct conditioning would have to account for. People learn to drive, to handle equipment, to behave in unfamiliar settings. Largely by watching, well before performing the behavior even once. If each had to be acquired by personal trial, any complex skill would take a lifetime. The second fact is clinical. Many people with a well-defined fear report no aversive experience with the object. A strict conditioning account has one thing to say. The person must have forgotten. Which is unfalsifiable in exactly the way chapter four point five objects to. One note about what happens in this section, because it is a change of position. Expectancies and beliefs get treated as causes of behavior, not by-products. That is what makes this the bridge into the cognitive model of chapter six.
Observation
Information About a Contingency, Not a Copy
Observational learning is acquisition through watching another person. Three elements. The model is the person whose behavior is observed. The observer is the person watching. And the observed consequence is what happens to the model as a result. That last element is what makes this learning rather than mere imitation. The observer acquires information about what a behavior produces. The research usually cited is the Bobo doll work of the early nineteen sixties. Children who watched an adult behave aggressively toward an inflatable doll then did so more. What it established is real. Novel behavior can be acquired by observation alone. What it did not establish is anything about aggression toward people. The measure was immediate imitation, and there was no follow-up.
Four Processes
Each One Fails in Its Own Way
Observational learning is not automatic. Four processes must each succeed. And the failure of any one of them prevents the learning. Attention. The observer must notice the behavior. This fails when the model is ignored, or the observer is distracted or distressed. Retention. The behavior must be held in memory in a usable form. This fails when a sequence is too complex to encode in one viewing. Reproduction. The observer must be capable of performing it. This is the stage that separates knowing how something is done from being able to do it. Motivation. There must be a reason to perform it. This fails when no useful outcome is expected, or the observed consequence was punishing. The remedy differs at each point, which is why the failure modes matter. A retention failure calls for breaking the sequence into parts.
Vicarious
A Consequence That Happens to Somebody Else
Vicarious reinforcement increases an observer's likelihood of a behavior, after seeing another reinforced. Vicarious punishment is the corresponding decrease. Now notice why this is a theoretical break rather than a detail. Under the earlier model, a consequence works because it happens to the performer. Here it happens to somebody else, and still changes the observer's behavior. So what transmits is information about a contingency. And what is acquired is an outcome expectancy. A belief about what a behavior is likely to produce. An expectancy is an internal state, and admitting it as a cause breaks with strict behaviorism. Watch a colleague criticized for raising a concern, and you learn that workplace's contingencies. One more consequence. Acquisition and expression are separable. What a person does under observation is a lower bound on what they have learned.
Three Pathways
How Fears Are Acquired
Put this section together with the last two, and you get three pathways to a fear. Direct conditioning. An aversive event in the presence of the stimulus. The observational route. Seeing someone else respond with fear. A child whose parent visibly freezes at every dog develops the same response. And the informational route. Being told the object is dangerous. Now read the treatment column: exposure appears in every one of the three rows. That constancy is the most clinically important thing here. The route of acquisition does not determine the treatment. It determines what else is needed alongside exposure. And it settles a common question about people who recall no originating event. Under a three-pathway account, that absence tells you nothing at all.
Mutual Influence
Reciprocal Determinism, and Who Makes a Good Model
Reciprocal determinism proposes that person, behavior, and environment each influence the other two. Rather than the environment acting one-directionally on the person. Every link runs both ways, and that is the whole departure from the earlier model. Work an example. Someone who expects rejection avoids situations where it is possible. Which produces an environment containing fewer social encounters. Which supplies no evidence against the expectation. The environment did not simply happen to them. Their behavior helped produce it. This does not make the person responsible for their difficulty. The point is causal, not moral. A cycle with three mutually reinforcing links has three points of entry. And the easiest one to change is frequently not the one that started it. One more practical note. Not all models are equally influential. Perceived similarity, status, competence, and warmth all increase influence.
Self-Efficacy
A Belief About a Task, Not About a Person
Self-efficacy is a belief in your capability to do a specific thing in a specific situation. Three features of that definition are load-bearing. It is a belief rather than an ability. It is about a specific action rather than about the person in general. And it concerns capability rather than worth. Self-esteem is a global evaluation of your own worth. Self-efficacy is a specific judgment about a task, and the two are independent. An accomplished surgeon may have high efficacy for operating and low self-esteem. General confidence is a broad disposition, and efficacy varies across tasks. The same person may be highly capable at work and dread telephoning a stranger. Efficacy is task-specific, which means it can be built task by task. And interventions aimed at general self-regard are not what the construct predicts will help.
Four Sources
The Ranking Is Steeply Uneven
Four sources build self-efficacy, and the ranking between them is steeply uneven. Mastery experience is first, by a considerable margin. Actually performing the action successfully, particularly after effort. Vicarious experience is second. Seeing someone comparable succeed at the same action. It is strongest where the model is seen as similar to the observer. Verbal persuasion is third, and weak alone. And fourth, how you interpret your own arousal and mood in the moment. That is the only source that works in both directions. Arousal read as excitement raises efficacy. The same arousal read as failure lowers it. Mastery dominating is the point of the ranking. Which is why encouragement alone so reliably fails. And it sets the difficulty: not certain success, not likely failure, but difficult and achievable.
Avoidance
Skill Present, Belief Absent
Here is the clinically central claim of this section. Low efficacy expectations sustain avoidance independently of actual skill. And the avoidance removes the only experience that would revise the belief. Two-factor theory explains why avoidance is maintained, by relief. The efficacy account adds why it is initiated. Someone who has the skill, has been told repeatedly, and still will not attempt it. The missing ingredient is not skill or encouragement. It is mastery experience. A coping model beats a mastery model. Watching effortless performance can lower efficacy: the observer concludes the model is different. Watching someone visibly find it hard and manage anyway raises it. And participant modeling adds mastery. Watch, then do it with support, then alone. One caution. A person who succeeds and credits luck gains no efficacy from it.
Transmission
The Same Processes Carry Difficulties
The same processes that transmit skills transmit difficulties. Children observe how the adults around them respond to threat and setback. A parent who consistently avoids a class of situation is supplying observational learning. This is not a claim that parents cause their children's difficulties. And blaming families is both unwarranted and clinically counterproductive. Peer groups matter too, because peers supply models of high perceived similarity. Now the media-violence debate, which is genuinely disputed and presented as such. For: laboratory experiments repeatedly find short-term increases in aggressive behavior. Against: the laboratory measures are proxies, and the inference to real violence is long. People already disposed toward aggression select violent media. A defensible summary: short-term effects on proxy measures are reasonably established. Whether they translate into real-world violence is not.
Composite Cases
Yusuf, 26, and Claire, 38
Two composite cases, constructed for instruction. Neither describes a real person. Yusuf is twenty-six, with a marked fear of dogs. He has never been bitten, chased, or frightened by a dog, and is confident of this. He recalls that his mother was visibly frightened of dogs throughout his childhood. And she told him repeatedly that dogs are unpredictable. A conditioning-only account fails here. There is no unconditioned stimulus. Two pathways account for it without difficulty. Observational, and informational. But note what this does not license. No blame attaches to Yusuf's mother. Second case. Claire is thirty-eight, an experienced analyst. She has declined three opportunities to present her work to her department. The pattern began two years ago, after a presentation where she lost her place. Colleagues tell her she is capable, but verbal persuasion ranks third and is weak alone. What she has not had in two years is mastery experience. So the intervention is graded speaking tasks, difficult enough to count. Not more reassurance.
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