Social Learning Theory: A Contextualist Account of Cognitive Functioning

Abstract

Social learning theory grew out of the efforts of Bandura and Walters (1959, 1963) to explain how children acquired information and behavior by observing people in natural settings. Initially they investigated youngsters' simple imitation of common responses, such as aggression, by a model. Favorable results of this research prompted study of more complex classes of social learning, such as the development of emotional reactions (attraction and avoidance), cognitive and linguistic rules, self-regulating responses, personal standards, expectations, and self-efficacy judgments. This social interactionist approach to development revealed a distinctive but widely underestimated feature of children's knowledge: At all levels of complexity, it remained highly' dependent on the social environmental context from which it sprang. This property of thought also became evident to other theorists as they began to study cognitive functioning in naturalistic settings. Several of these theo-rists have discussed the implications of their research on the basis of a general episte-mology termed "contextualism." This chapter is divided into two major sections. The first section provides a description of a growing consensus about the need for a contextual account of cog-nitive functioning, the metatheoretical form that contextualist formulations have adopted, and some implications of these formulations for cognitive-developmental research. In the second section, social learning theory is described and contextual features of this approach are delineated. Research revealing the contextual dependency of children's cognitive, mnemonic, and linguistic functioning is summarized and considered from a social learning viewpoint. C. J. Brainerd (ed.), Recent Advances in Cognitive-Developmental Theory