Albert Bandura's Theory of Social Learning

The concept of "apprentice" may seem flat and without nuances, but the truth is that it has evolved a lot over time. After all, if we get philosophical, there are no easy answers to any question. What are we talking about when we talk about learning? Is the fact of mastering a skill or subject our own merit? What is the nature of the process of learning and what agents are involved in this?

In the West, the usual was consider man as the only motor of his learning process: the idea of ​​man in search of virtue (with permission from the corresponding deity). Then, behavioral psychologists arrived and revolutionized the landscape: the human being went from being the only one responsible for his own personal development to become a piece of meat enslaved by external pressures Y conditioning processes.

In a few years he had gone from believing in a naive free will to holding a fierce determinism. Between these two opposite poles appeared a Canadian psychologist who would speak of learning in more moderate terms:

Albert bandura, the thinking mind behind the modern Social Learning Theory (TAS).

Albert Bandura's Theory of Social Learning: interaction and learning

Just like he did Lev vygotsky, Albert Bandura also focuses the focus of his study on the learning processes in the interaction between the learner and the environment. And, more specifically, between the learner and the social environment. Whereas behavioral psychologists explained the acquisition of new skills and knowledge through a gradual approach based on various trials with reinforcement, Bandura attempted to explain why subjects who learn from each other can see how their level of knowledge gives a qualitative leap important in one go, without the need for many trials. The key is found in the word "social" that is included in the TAS.

Behaviorists, says Bandura, underestimate the social dimension of behavior reducing it to a scheme according to which one person influences another and causes association mechanisms to be triggered in the second. This process is not interaction, but rather a sending of information packets from one organism to another. Therefore, the Social Learning Theory proposed by Bandura includes the behavioral factor and the cognitive factor, two components without which social relationships cannot be understood.

Learning and reinforcement

On the one hand, Bandura admits that when we learn we are linked to certain processes of conditioning and positive or negative reinforcement. In the same way, he recognizes that our behavior cannot be understood if we do not take into account the aspects of our environment that are influencing us by way of external pressures, as the behaviorists.

Atmosphere

Certainly, for a society to exist, however small it may be, there has to be a context, a space in which all its members exist. In turn, that space conditions us to a greater or lesser degree by the simple fact that we are inserted in it.

It is difficult to disagree with this: it is impossible to imagine a soccer player learning to play on his own, in a great void. The player will refine his technique by not only seeing what is the best way to score goals, but also by reading the reactions of his teammates, the referee and even the public. In fact, most likely he would not even have become interested in this sport if he had not been pushed into it by a certain social pressure. Many times it is others who set part of our learning objectives.

The cognitive factor

However, Bandura reminds us, we must also take into account the other side of the coin of Social Learning Theory: the cognitive factor. The apprentice is not a passive subject who dispassionately attends the ceremony of his apprenticeship, but who actively participates in the process and even expects things from this stage of training: has expectations. In an interpersonal learning context we are able to foresee the novel results of our actions (from right or wrong way), and therefore we are not totally dependent on conditioning, which is based on repetition. That is to say: we are capable of transforming our experiences into original acts in anticipation of a future situation that had never occurred before.

Thanks to the psychological processes that behaviorists They haven't bothered to study, we use our continuous input of data of all kinds to take a qualitative leap forward and imagine future situations that have yet to come.

Vicarious learning

The pinnacle of the social aspect is the vicarious learning remarked by Bandura, in which an organism is able to extract lessons from the observation of what another does. Thus, we are able to learn by doing something difficult to measure in a laboratory: the observation (and attention) with which we follow someone's adventures. Do you remember the controversies that periodically break out about whether or not it is advisable for children to watch certain movies or television series? They are not an isolated case: many adults find it tempting to participate in Reality shows when weighing the pros and cons of what happens to the contestants of the last edition.

Note: a mnemonic trick to remember the vicarious learning that Bandura talks about is to fry at snakes or "projections" that come out of the eyes of the lord of the video clip Vicarious, in which many eyes and many things also appear foreign.

A middle ground

Ultimately, Bandura uses his Social Learning Theory model to remind us that, as learners in continuous training, our private and unpredictable psychological processes are important. However, although they are secret and belong only to us, these psychological processes have a partly social origin. It is precisely thanks to our ability to see ourselves in the behavior of others that we can decide what works and what doesn't.

In addition, these elements of learning serve to build the personality of each individual:

• "The Personality Theory of Albert Bandura"

We are able to foresee things based on what happens to others, in the same way that the fact of living in a social environment makes us consider certain learning objectives and not others.

Regarding our role as apprentices, it is clear: we are neither self-sufficient gods nor automatons..