hello everybody welcome back so we just covered classical conditioning and we covered operant conditioning so now we're going to switch gears and cover something a little bit different we're going to cover social cognitive learning theories so as you know the behavioral psychologists are responsible for much of the research on learning and what we know about classical conditioning and operant conditioning many behavioral psychologists did not allow for speculation what happened inside the mind when learning occurred because they wanted because they wanted to focus psychology on only observable events to make it a more objective science so under the umbrella of behavioral psychology is also social cognitive learning theorists social cognitive learning theorists their focus was more on human learning they contended that most human learning is acquired by observation that is by observing other people in a social context rather than through classical conditioning or operant conditioning so social cognitive learning theorists one of the major concepts that they looked at was observational learning observational learning is learning new responses by observing the behavior of another rather than through direct experience so these theories mostly apply to humans and acknowledge that humans unlike rats dogs or pigeons have attitudes they have belief they have goals and expectations that affect learning so observational learning theorists they were different than the radical behaviorists that they took into account thought processes of the learner when learning occurred so that was a major difference the major difference was number one a focus on human learning number two in acknowledgement that much of human learning is made through observation and number three speculation about what happens inside the mind when learning occurs so one of the most famous uh social cognitive learning theorists is albert bandura and here he is right here in the picture he was actually a professor at stanford university and he just recently passed away at the age of i think it was 91 or 95 but he was in his 90s when he passed away anyway i i just so happened to look him up in a google search before i put this ability together and so he's fairly recently recently gone but he lived a long good life um in terms of albert bandura he is rated really high among one of the most influential psychologists in american history so he's actually a very prominent psychologist okay so anyways one of the one of the things that albert bandura believed and other social cognitive learning theorists uh was they they believe in vicarious conditioning vicarious conditioning occurs from the from observing a model so basically what happened was i can observe another person's behavior and i can learn from the consequences of their behavior for example if their behavior resulted in reinforcement not only did it make the actor more likely to engage in that behavior it also made me more likely to engage in that behavior if i saw the actor engage in behavior and have a punishment right not only would the actor be less likely to engage in that behavior but me too as an observer would be less likely to observe in that behavior so i could learn through observation via vicarious conditioning and vicarious conditioning right then affects my plans my expectations and my beliefs in other words it affects the um it affects um parts of my mind that are involved with learning like such as planning expectations beliefs and s and ultimately future behaviors so for example when it comes to children a little girl might observe her mother putting on makeup and then being um maybe having reinforcement as a result so little girl watches her mother put on makeup and then maybe the daddy will go to the mother and say oh you're so pretty right so what happens is the little girl sees this right and then she begins to model the mom's behavior because she saw that putting on makeup resulted in reinforcement so the little girl follows suit and also starts to play make believe and put on makeup like her mother the same thing is true for a little boy a little boy might observe his father shaving and then after shaving the little boy might observe his mother saying to his father oh you're so handsome when you shave right stroke his face so what the little boy will do is uh he will observe this he will learn via observational learning he will experience the reinforcement vicariously and as a result the it will this will affect the little boy's subsequent planning expectations and behavior and the little boy might engage in modeling behavior in this case the modeling behavior is playshaving so many of these many of these theories are supported by bandura's studies with children learning social behaviors the observation [Music] so in one of bandura's classic studies there is uh children saw a video of johnny and rocky so some children saw the video and some people did not so in this famous experiment uh children watched the film of rocky and johnny playing with toys then johnny refuses to share his toys with rocky rocky responds by cl clobbering johnny rocky's behavior is didn't reinforce because rocky ends up with all the toys having a good time and johnny sits dejected in a corner without any toys so what happened was in bandura's experiment some children observed the johnny in rocky video and some children did not so what bandura found was that after watching the video children who watched the video were much more likely to be more violent in their play after watching the video and children who did not watch the video were a lot less violent so essentially what bandura said is that via observational learning and vicarious conditioning children who saw the video saw that violent behavior was i guess reinforced by being rewarded with having more toys and having a better time as a result right so as a result children who saw the video they're more likely to model the violent behavior because they saw that it led to a reinforcement and positive outcome in the video so that they too modeled that behavior in real life when they had the opportunity to play and what he also found was that the children who did not see the film were a lot less aggressive another famous study by bandura involved bobo dolls if you don't know what the bobo doll is maybe you had one maybe you didn't because they're kind of like old toys you don't see them too often um i had one actually when i was a kid in the 70s well the bobo doll it it's an inflatable clown and you can hit the clown and it'll fall on his back and it'll pop right back up and then you can hit it again and they'll follow us back and they'll pop right back up that's the bobo doll in this particular experiment the experimenter brings the child into a room filled with toys and the experimenter tells a child okay you can play with any toy you want to and then the little kids are right all right yay and as the experimenter is leaving the room uh the experimenter in some in some conditions will begin uh playing aggressively with the with the bobo doll right uh kicking it sitting on it uh punching it throwing it around and what happens in this experiment is those children who saw the experimenter being aggressive with the boba doll modeled this behavior and were also more aggressive in their play with the bobo dog and other toys children who did not observe the experimenter being aggressive with the bobo dao were much less aggressive so once again uh children were modeling the behaviors of the of the of the experimenter right and they saw that when the experimenter was being aggressive with the play uh they thought maybe this is how they should also play right they imitated the experimenter um and as a result they were just much more aggressive so they learned through observation what was maybe appropriate or expected for that situation and it affected their behavior so but the point is is that when learning occurred learning occurred in the mind right and in order to explain learning social cognitive learning theorists um they expanded learning theory by speculating about what happens inside the mind when learning occurs okay so this is albert bandura and [Music] do you think that adults also model and copy the behavior of other people and the answer is absolutely think about for example movie stars or maybe your favorite rock stars or rappers many times as adults right we will try to model the behavior of our most favorite movie stars what they're wearing the words that they use how they speak the types of music that they listen to or or when it comes to rock stars we might try to even imitate you know rock stars how they dress their attitude we might even sing their songs you know follow their behavior by singing their songs so not only are little kids influenced through observational learning we too as adults are also very much influenced by observational learning okay so we model the behaviors of other people when the behavior of other people is reinforced so this brings us to media violence one of the things that albert bandura found was that when people saw media violence right on television or at the movie theaters he found the correlation the more media violence a person was exposed to you know either you know watched by choice for example the more immediate violence a person watched the more violent he or she was in here his or her real life behavior so albert bandura said that this is also evidence in support of social cognitive learning theory um so according to albert bandura people watch media violence right and then they model their behavior you know because media violence glorifies violent behavior like gangsters for example however one of the criticisms of albert bandura when it comes to the correlation between media violence and real violence is that this was a correlational study so we don't know in the end whether or not watching media violence cause people to be more violent or whether or not more violent people tend to watch more violent media right because it's a correlation study we don't know if it's actually a reverse causation okay so so class i um kind of forgot to mention this earlier but when it comes to operant conditioning in general how punishments and rewards influence our behavior and learning do you think punishments and rewards actually does impact our behavior even as adults what do you think well the answer is absolutely right you can say or argue that much of our behavior in america and in the world is governed by reinforcement and punishment so for example we follow this the speed limit because we don't want to get punished with the ticket we stop at red lights because we don't want to get punished with the ticket we go to school and we study because we want to get reinforced with good grades right we want to work hard at our job because we want to be reinforced with pay we work our hardest to look our best in order to be reinforced by getting the type of mate that we want to attract so when it comes to reinforcement and when it comes to punishment influencing our our behavior not only does it influence and shape our personality uh when we're young but reinforcement and punishment also influences our behavior as adults in terms of how we act in society and the type of goals that we have to make money and to attract mates yes reinforcement and punishment is very very much ineffective ways to control the behaviors of society as a whole oh okay well this is one of my students she sent a picture in of she and her cats so here she is uh doing that duck face and with your beautiful little kitty cat very sweet very sweet photo here's her uh her kitty cat when there was a little baby the blue collar in the bushes the tongue out and here is the same cat again with a happy loving face this is the face of love and content that cats make when they're very very happy very sweet okay last slide so when it comes to learning and when it comes to specifically modifying someone else's behavior what you want to do is you want to accentuate the positives you really want to make sure that you see their strengths and you reinforce those strengths hopefully build upon them you want to accentuate the positive and reinforce small improvements so remember we talked about shaping for example so if you wanted to shape like in animals behavior what you would do is you would um you would reinforce successive approximations of the desired goal behavior with human beings it's also the same thing what you want to do is you want to reinforce small improvements until you get to the end goal so the same principle also applies to human beings also one of the things when it comes to um modifying someone else's behavior is you want to be able to find the right reinforcers so you might think money is a reinforcer for people but you know what sometimes it's true sometimes it's not some people are motivated by money some people are motivated by love and attention some people are motivated by material things like i don't know gold or jewelry some people are motivated by food so my point is that we're trying to influence and modify someone else's behavior via operant conditioning and behavioral modification you want to find what are the reinforcers that work for that individual also you want to examine what exactly are you reinforcing are you reinforcing the behavior or are you reinforcing the attention that the behavior brings right so just make sure that what you're reinforcing is what you really want to reinforce when it comes to modifying your own behavior via operand conditioning and behavior modification number one you want to analyze the situation like if you're trying to quit smoking uh what are the situations that kind of make you want to smoke for example is it after meals is it before meals is it when you get on the phone is it when you start i don't know drinking a beer when you sit down to play poker with your friends what are the situations that make you smoke right where do you want to analyze it so you can better formulate a plan to correct it number one analyze the situation number two you want to set realistic goals going back to the smoking example don't expect to quit smoking on day one or day two right so you really want to make your goals much more realistic make your goal much more gradual like on week one i'm gonna smoke one less cigarette on week two i'm gonna smoke two less cigarettes you know until you get the week 20 you're smoking zero so just set realistic goals because if you don't you're setting yourself up for failure and you're more like more likely just to give up in addition keep records sometimes keeping records in and of itself uh can improve your behavior for the better so if you're keeping records of when you smoke a cigarette right this can actually lead you to smoke less because you're more cognizant of your of the behavior that you're trying to decrease so therefore you're more likely to not engage in it so keep records you know and obviously records are important for you to keep track of your of your success or your failure so you can modify your plan to uh maximize the the possibility that you're going to reach your goal so keep records and lastly when it comes to modifying your own behavior don't punish yourself don't be so hard on yourself if you don't reach your goal when as planned you know if you punish yourself this can actually discourage you from moving on so what you do is if you don't live up to your goal suck it up and try harder next time okay so don't punish yourself don't give up and eventually you're gonna be successful okay class well that's it for chapter seven hopefully you learned a lot if you have any questions please feel free to email me and i'm here for you i want you to learn and but you got to do your part and you got to study and you work hard and i can guarantee you that you are going to get an a if you set your mind to it and if you work hard enough it's within you to get an a in this class and i want to help you get there okay anyways i'll see you in the next video