Part I: Human Agency 

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To begin, it is important to see how Bandura viewed the essence of humanness. Humans are cognitively coded to assemble, control, and execute behaviors that they believe will produce enviable ramifications. This is really the core of what SCT is all about. Humans also can exercise, to some extent, control over events in their lives using agentic responses. These abilities that allow for this control define what it is to be human. These include the core features of

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1. Intentionality: Individuals commitment to engage in certain activities

2. Forethought: Individuals ability to anticipate the outcome of certain actions or set goals (Zhou & Brown, 2015)

3. Self-Reactiveness: The ability to monitor the progress of fulfilling an individual’s choices

4. Self-Reflectiveness: Individual’s ability to reflect on the efficiency of their conditions and behavior

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Another important part of human agency, but is also a part of the self-system are the different modes of agency such as proxy agency and collective agency. Again, these agencies, are ways in which people bring their influence to bear on events that affect how they live their lives. Proxy agency is the idea that people are able to have control over their everyday lives due to a certain dependency on others. For example, during quarantine, you might be reliant on food delivery and other services in order to work from home. Collective agency is the peoples' “shared belief in their collective power to produce desired results," (Bandura, 2000, p. 75). This validates that the control an individual has on their environment is not always isolated, but based on the contributions of peers.

 

Part II: Reciprocal Determinsm

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         Back with the idea of reciprocal determinism, this is the internal principle of the social cognitive theory. The complex interplay between behavior, personal factors (more heavily focused on cognition), and the environment. Unlike behaviorism or Freud's psychodynamic theory which is influenced by uni-directional causes, the SCT is bi-directional. It is important to note that based on differential contributions, Bandura does not suggest that the three factors make equal contributions. Furthermore, chance encounters and fortuitous events can canter the reciprocal determinism triangle, however, they will influence behavior in the same way as planned events eventually.

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Video: I created this video showing a uni-directional flow path in the bi-directional system of reciprocal determinism. The scenario is a student who is interested in guitar approaches a guitar player in one of the study rooms in the library. 

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Part III: Self System (Major Component of SCT)

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         Bandura defines the self-system as a degree of consistency in people's behavior based on a set of cognitive structures. It is this consistency that allows people to regulate the process of observing individuals and replicating that behavior. This is where a lot of the cognitive processes lie within the SCT. Self-efficacy is an integral part of this self-system in that it is the extent to which an individual believes they can master a particular skill (Zhou & Brown, 2015). It is integral to the SCT as it shows that learning most likely occurs when the observer has high self-efficacy in which he/she will have the confidence to replicate a certain task based on the model.  Bandura has defined self-efficacy as "a person's belief in their ability to produce desired results by their own actions," (Bandura, 1977).  Furthermore, according to Bandura, “’Self-efficacy is the belief in one's capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations,’ (Bandura, 1995, p. 2),” (Pajares, 2002). Self-Efficacy plays a major role in how we approach making goals, tasks, and challenges. Individuals with high self-efficacy will be more confident to master challenging problems or tasks. They can also easily rebound from failures to start trying once again. People with low self-efficacy is the opposite of the high case and can be seen as people with low-confidence and don’t have the ability to believe they will perform well. As eluded to earlier, people with high self-efficacy will be more likely to replicate behaviors and exhibit the idea of the social learning theory. Factors that play into self-efficacy are:

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1. Mastery Experiences: Process of completing simple tasks that will lead to more difficult goals

2. Social Modeling: Observing someone succeed or fail in a particular situation

3. Social/Verbal Persuasion: The ability to listen to a credible peer for encouraging words.

4. Physical and Emotional States: Emotional states such as anxiety which can have a negative effect on self-efficacy

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Video: A video I created diving deeper into the concept of self-efficacy.

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There is also another important factor in the self-system which is called self-regulation. Just like self-efficacy, it relies heavily on cognitive processes. In short, it is an attempt to reduce the gap between accomplishments and goals while concurrently setting more difficult and new goals. They are self-directed changes that allow the individual to be goal-oriented and actively involved in thinking and behaving in response to the changing environment in order to successfully accomplish personal goals. More deeply into the cognitive idea, self-regulation is “considered when an individual has his or her own ideas about what is appropriate or inappropriate behavior and chooses actions accordingly (Williams, 2010),” (Nabavi, 2012). 

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Figure: Image showing the different processes and stages of self-regulation (Nabavi, 2012). 

 

 

Part IV: The Learning Process

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               It is important to note that people learn through observing one another and resolving the consequences of their actions.  Bandura believed that observational learning is more efficient than learning through direct experience. The learning process can mostly be described through modeling. According to Bandura, “Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action. (Bandura, 1977b, p. 22),” (Zhou & Brown, 2015). Models can be characterized as either interpersonal imitation or media sources such as commercials, movies, and social media. The success of being able to retain and imitate such models depends on four factors: attentional processes, retention processes, production processes, and motivational processes. Attention processes are the specific social behavior that an observer gives attention to based on accessibility, relevance, and complexity. Retention is based very heavily on the observer’s memory through visual imagery and verbal coding. This is done by converting an observation into a symbol which can then be accessed in the future for a potential reenactment. Production is the physical translation from the stored symbolic representation into an action. Motivation is the decision an observer must make in order to decide if the modeled behavior will produce an outcome, he/she values.