Module 7

12 Social‐Cognitive Theory:

Bandura and Mischel Questions to be Addressed in this Chapter Relating Social-Cognitive Theory to the Previous Theories A View of the Theorists Social-Cognitive Theory's View of the Person Social-Cognitive Theory's View of the Science of Personality Social-Cognitive Theory of Personality: Structure Social-Cognitive Theory of Personality: Process Social-Cognitive Theory of Growth and Development Major Concepts Review Chapter Focus Do you remember your first day of high school? Perhaps, you don't care to! What could be more unnerving than not knowing how to act, especially in an environment where “fitting in” is paramount? Although she was really anxious and unsure of what to expect, one young woman decided to approach the first day of high school as an opportunity to learn. Her plan was to model herself after the most successful seniors in the school. She paid close attention to what they talked about, what they wore, where they went, and when they went there. Soon, she was the coolest freshman in the class. This young woman was very influenced by her new environment, but she was also an active agent in choosing how to respond to that influence. This idea, that behavior is the result of an interaction between the person and the environment, is a key concept in the social‐cognitive theory of personality. This theory is distinctive in its emphasis on the social origins of behavior and the importance of cognition (thought processes) in human functioning. People are viewed as capable of actively directing their own lives and learning complex patterns of behavior in the absence of rewards. Social‐cognitive theory has developed considerably during the past few decades and today is an important force in the science of personality. Questions to be Addressed in this Chapter What is the role of thinking, or “cognitive,” processes in personality? How do people learn complex social behaviors? How can one scientifically analyze people's capacity for personal agency, that is, their ability to influence their actions and the course of their own development? In what ways do variations—as opposed to consistencies—in a person's behavior reveal the nature of his or her personality? Social‐cognitive theory has roots in the behavioral/learning tradition (Chapter 10). Beginning in the 1950s, some theorists tried to shift learning theory's focus from animals in boxes to social learning: the acquisition of new patterns of behavior by humans acting in a social world. It is also rooted, in part, in the tradition pioneered by George Kelly: the study of cognition, including the cognitive structures that people use to interpret events. By synthesizing and advancing beyond these past traditions, theorists created a social‐cognitive approach that has risen to prominence in contemporary personality science. Relating Social‐Cognitive Theory to the Previous Theories In crafting their theory, social‐cognitivists tried to overcome the limitations of prior theories of personality (the ones covered in our previous chapters). Their critiques of past theories constitute a good introduction to the social‐cognitive approach (see Bandura, 1986, 1999, 2012; Mischel, 1999, 2001). To the social‐cognitivist, psychoanalysts overemphasize unconscious forces and the influence of early childhood experience. Social‐cognitive theorists place greater emphasis on conscious self‐reflection and argue that critical developmental processes occur not only in early childhood but also throughout the life course (Artistico et al., 2011). Social‐cognitive theorists question the core premise of trait theory: that personality can be understood in terms of overall, average tendencies (i.e., average trait levels). They believe that personality is revealed in both average levels of behavior and patterns of variability in action. Are you shy with some people but outgoing with others? Motivated on some tasks but lazy on others? Social‐cognitive theory sees such variability as revealing of personality structure (Mischel & Shoda, 2008). Social‐cognitive theorists question the adequacy of evolutionary psychology. How, they ask, can an evolutionary perspective explain the vast changes in human social life observed from one historical period to another (Bandura, 2006; Bussey & Bandura, 1999). A century ago, evolutionary psychologists might have explained why women are evolutionarily predisposed to stay at home rather than entering the workforce. Now that women have entered the workforce in massive numbers, such an explanation makes little sense. Finally, social‐cognitive theory rejects the behavioristic argument that environmental stimuli control behavior. People also have a capacity for self‐control. Cognitive capabilities, they argue, enable people to shape the course of their own development (Bandura, 2006). These capabilities also allow people to learn new patterns of behavior by observation, or “modeling,” even in the absence of reinforcement (Table 12.1). TABLE 12.1 Distinguishing Features of Social‐Cognitive Theory Emphasis on people as active agents Emphasis on social origins of behavior Emphasis on cognitive (thought) processes Emphasis on both average behavioral tendencies and variability in behavior Emphasis on the learning of complex patterns of behavior in the absence of rewards Many contemporary personality psychologists have contributed to social‐cognitive theory (Cervone & Shoda, 1999b). However, two of them have made extraordinarily seminal contributions that mark them as the primary social‐cognitive personality theorists: Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel. Although they focus on somewhat different aspects of personality functioning, their contributions complement one another and contribute to a coherent body of social‐cognitive theory and research. A View of the Theorists Albert Bandura (1925–) Albert Bandura grew up in northern Alberta, Canada. After graduating from the University of British Columbia, he pursued graduate work in clinical psychology at the University of Iowa, known for its excellence in research on learning processes. In an interview, Bandura indicated that he “had a strong interest in conceptualizing clinical phenomena in ways that would make them amenable to experimental test, with the view that as practitioners we have a responsibility for assessing the efficacy of a procedure, so that people are not subjected to treatments before we know their effects” (quoted in Evans, 1976, p. 243). After obtaining his Ph.D. at Iowa in 1952, Bandura joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he has spent his entire career. Work on social factors that contribute to children's development of aggressive behavior resulted in two books with Richard Walters, his first graduate student: Adolescent Aggression (Bandura & Walters, 1959) and Social Learning and Personality Development (Bandura & Walters, 1963). The latter volume, in particular, laid the foundations for the social‐cognitive perspective Bandura developed throughout the latter third of the 20th century. In 1969, Principles of Behavior Modification (Bandura, 1969) reformulated the practice of behavior therapy by directing therapists' attention to the thinking processes of their clients, rather than to the environmental factors and conditioning processes emphasized by behaviorists (Chapter 10). Since the 1970s, Bandura has focused on “self‐processes,” that is, thinking processes involving self‐conceptions and personal goals (1977, 1997). He contends that self‐processes give people the capacity for personal agency, that is, the capacity to affect their own behavior and experiences. Bandura's social‐cognitive theory thus is an “agentic” conception of human nature (Bandura, 1999, 2001, 2012). Bandura examines how interpersonal, social, and socioeconomic conditions influence people's self‐referent beliefs (Bandura, 2006). Bandura's monumental Social Foundations of Thought and Action (Bandura, 1986) organized a vast body of knowledge about personality processes, structures, and development within a social‐cognitive framework. It stands as the definitive statement of his theoretical position. He has remained active well past traditional “retirement age”; Bandura's most recent book, a comprehensive analysis of ways in which otherwise good people sometimes commit unethical and immoral acts, was published in 2015. Bandura has received innumerable rewards and honors. They include the presidency of the American Psychological Association APA's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, the William James Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS) for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology, and honorary degrees from universities throughout North America and Europe. In a fitting capstone to his career in 2016, Bandura became the first figure in the history of personality theory and research to receive the U.S. National Medal of Science. Albert Bandura, creator of Social Cognitive Theory, receiving the United States National Medal of Science from former U.S. President Barack Obama. Walter Mischel (1930–) Walter Mischel was born in Vienna and lived his first nine years “in easy playing distance of Freud's house.” He describes the possible influence of this period as follows: When I began to read psychology Freud fascinated me most. As a student at City College (in New York, where my family settled after the Hitler‐caused forced exodus from Europe in 1939), psychoanalysis seemed to provide a comprehensive view of man. But my excitement fizzled when I tried to apply ideas as a social worker with “juvenile delinquents” in New York's Lower East Side: somehow trying to give those youngsters “insight” didn't help either them or me. The concepts did not fit what I saw, and I went looking for more useful ones. Source: Mischel, 1978, personal communication. Characterizations of individuals on common trait dimensions (such as “Conscientiousness” or “Sociability”) provided useful overall summaries of their average levels of behavior but missed, it seemed to me, the striking discriminativeness often visible within the same person if closely observed over time and across situations. Might the same person who is more caring, giving, and supportive than most people in relation to his family also be less caring and altruistic than most people in other contexts? Might these variations across situations be meaningful stable patterns that characterize the person enduringly rather than random fluctuations? If so, how could they be understood and what did they reflect? Might they be worth taking into account in personality assessment for the conceptualization of the stability and flexibility of human behavior and qualities? These questions began to gnaw at me and the effort to answer them became a fundamental goal for the rest of my life. Source: Mischel, as quoted in Pervin, 1996, p. 76. Walter Mischel. In addition to critiquing previous approaches, in 1973, Mischel provided an alternative: a set of cognitive‐social personal variables (Mischel, 1973; discussed below). They were designed to explain the discriminativeness of behavior, that is, how people distinguish between situations (even seemingly similar ones) and vary their actions adaptively from one situation to the next. “Might the same person who is more caring, giving, and supportive than most people in relation to his family also be less caring and altruistic than most people in other contexts?” Mischel asks. “Might these variations across situations be meaningful stable patterns that characterize the person enduringly?” (Mischel, in Pervin, 1996, p. 76). Such questions drove Mischel's work, including his development of a “systems” perspective in which personality is understood as a complex, interconnected system of cognitive and affective processes that are activated by features of social situations (Mischel & Shoda, 2008). Mischel also has become extremely well known thanks to “the marshmallow test” (Mischel, 2014), a simple research paradigm (described below) that revealed highly consequential individual differences in people's ability to control their impulsive tendencies. In terms of his view of human nature, Mischel suggests that while genes are important in shaping personality, there remains great potential for personality change: “I think, therefore I can change what I am” (2014, p. 278). Mischel's numerous honors include APA's Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions, APS's William James Award, the Ludwig Wittgenstein Prize from the Austrian Research Foundation, and election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He also has served as Editor of Psychological Review, psychology's leading publication outlet for theoretical papers. Bandura's and Mischel's scientific impact is particularly noteworthy. A quantitative review (Haggbloom et al., 2002) of the impact of 20th‐century psychologists found that both Bandura and Mischel were among that century's top 25 most influential figures, with the work of only three psychologists—Skinner, Piaget, and Freud—having greater impact than Bandura's. A 2007 analysis of the most cited book authors in the humanities and social sciences found Bandura's work to be more frequently cited than that of any other psychologist. Social‐Cognitive Theory's View of the Person The simplest way to understand the social‐cognitive theory view of the person is to ask, “What is a person?” What makes some beings “persons” and others “not persons”? Three psychological qualities of persons are unique. People (1) reason about the world using language; (2) contemplate not only present circumstances but also past and hypothetical future events; and (3) reflect on themselves, thinking about themselves and their own thinking. Curiously, many prior personality theories did not emphasize these uniquely human abilities. Psychoanalysts highlighted animalistic impulsive forces. Behaviorists treated people as machines and based theories on research with animals. Trait theorists report that the Big Five personality traits are found in animals, too (Gosling & John, 1999). Social‐cognitive theory, by contrast, centers its attention on uniquely human cognitive capacities (Bandura, 1999). As Mischel puts it: The image is one of the human being as an active, aware problem‐solver, capable of profiting from an enormous range of experiences and cognitive capacities, possessing great potential for good or ill, actively constructing his or her psychological world, and influencing the environment but also being influenced by it in lawful ways… . It is an image that has moved a long way from the instinctual drive‐reduction models, the static global traits, and the automatic stimulus‐response bonds of traditional personality theories. Source: Mischel, 1976, p. 253. Social‐Cognitive Theory's View of the Science of Personality Many personality theorists have remained outside of the mainstream of psychological science. Freud, Rogers, and Kelly, for example, barely took notice of advances in the overall science of psychology. Social‐cognitivists take a different approach. They try to capitalize on advances throughout psychology, as well as related sciences of human nature (Cervone & Mischel, 2002). They pursue an integrative task: to synthesize knowledge from diverse fields into a coherent portrait of human nature and the differences among persons. A second feature of the social‐cognitive view of personality science is its emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual. Social‐cognitive theorists employ idiographic (see Chapter 7) methods to capture the idiosyncrasies of individuals (cf. Molenaar & Campbell, 2009). Finally, Bandura and Mischel have pursued practical applications of their theoretical ideas. They stress that a bottom line for evaluating a theory is whether it yields practical tools that benefit human welfare. Social‐Cognitive Theory of Personality: Structure The personality structures emphasized by social‐cognitive theory mainly involve cognitive processes. Four structural concepts are particularly noteworthy: competencies and skills, expectancies and beliefs, behavioral standards, and personal goals.

Competencies and Skills The first type of personality structure in social‐cognitive theory is skills, or competencies. The core insight of the theory is that differences between people we observe may not be caused only by differences in emotions or motivational impulses, as other theories have emphasized. Instead, the differences may reflect variations in people's skill in executing different types of action. Some people may, for example, act in an introverted manner because they lack the social skills that are required to execute socially effective extraverted acts. Others may be conscientious because they have acquired a large degree of cognitive skills that enable them to adhere to social norms. Of particular interest to social‐cognitive theorists, then, are cognitive competencies and skills in solving problems and coping with the challenges of life (Cantor, 1990; Mischel & Shoda, 1999, 2008). Competencies involve both ways of thinking about life problems and behavioral skills in executing solutions to them. They involve two types of knowledge: procedural and declarative knowledge (Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987). Declarative knowledge is knowledge that we can state in words. Procedural knowledge refers to cognitive and behavioral capacities that a person may have without being able to articulate the exact nature of those capacities; the person can execute the behavioral “procedure” without being able to say how he or she did it. For example, you may be good at cheering up a friend who is feeling depressed, yet you may not be able to say in words precisely what it is that you do that enables you to succeed at this task. Competencies, then, involve a combination of declarative and procedural knowledge. A focus on competencies has two implications. The first involves context specificity. The term refers to the fact that psychological structures that are relevant to some social situations, or contexts, may be irrelevant to others. Context specificity is a natural feature of skills (Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987). A person may have excellent study skills, but these are of little use when it comes to getting a date or resolving an argument. Different contexts present different challenges that require different competencies. A person who is competent in one context may not be competent in another. This emphasis on context specificity (also see Chapter 14) differentiates social‐cognitive theory from trait approaches (Chapters 7 and 8), which feature context‐free personality variables. Social‐cognitive theory generally rejects context‐free variables—particularly when discussing cognitive competencies. The last thing social‐cognitivists would do is to assume that one person is “generally more competent” than another. Instead, they recognize that any person's competencies may vary considerably from one domain of life to another. The second implication involves psychological change. Competencies are acquired through social interaction and observation of the social world (Bandura, 1986). People who lack skills in a particular area of life can change. They can engage in new interactions and new observations of the world and thereby acquire new competencies. The ideas of social‐cognitive theory therefore can be applied directly to clinical applications that are designed to boost people's life skills (Chapter 13). Beliefs and Expectancies The other three social‐cognitive structures can be understood by considering three different ways that people may think about the world (Cervone, 2004). One set of thoughts involves beliefs about what the world actually is like and what things probably will be like in the future. These thoughts are called beliefs and—when the beliefs are directed to the future—expectancies. A second class of thinking involves thoughts about what things should be like. These thoughts are evaluative standards, that is, mental criteria (or standards) for evaluating the goodness or worth of events. A third class of thinking involves thoughts about what one wants to achieve in the future. These thoughts are called personal goals. In addition to competencies, then, the other three main social‐cognitive personality structures are beliefs and expectancies, evaluative standards, and goals. First, we will consider beliefs and expectancies, which we will refer to simply as “expectancies” here because social‐cognitive theory so strongly emphasizes the role people's beliefs about prospective future events have in personality functioning. Social‐cognitive theory contends that a primary determinant of our actions and emotions is our expectations about the future. People have expectancies concerning topics such as the likely behavior of other people, the rewards or punishments that may follow a certain type of behavior, or their own ability to handle the stress and challenges. It is this system of thoughts about the future that constitutes the person's expectancies. As was the case with skills and competencies, a person's expectations may vary considerably from one situation to another. Everyone expects that the same action might elicit different reactions in different situations (e.g., loud, jovial behavior at a party versus a church). People naturally discriminate among situations, expecting different opportunities, rewards, and constraints in different settings. Although researchers sometimes do study generalized expectations, most social‐cognitive investigators study expectancies in a domain‐linked manner. In other words, they assess people's expectancies with regard to specific areas, or domains, of their life. Social‐cognitive theorists recognize that the capacity to vary expectations and behavior from one situation to another is basic to survival. No animal could survive if it failed to make such discriminations. Because of their tremendous cognitive capacity, humans make an incredible variety of discriminations among situations. A key point in the social‐cognitive approach is that, when forming expectancies, people may group together situations in ways that are highly idiosyncratic. One person may group together situations involving school versus social life and, perhaps, have high expectations in one domain and low expectations in the other. Another person may think of situations in terms of relaxing circumstances versus circumstances that make him or her anxious—where both relaxing and anxiety‐provoking circumstances could occur both at school and in social life. Yet another person may possess a cognitive category that involves “opportunities to get a date”—where those opportunities could be relaxing or anxiety provoking and could arise in social settings or at school. People naturally “slice up” the situations of their lives in different ways and, thus, may display idiosyncratic patterns of expectancies and social behavior. According to social‐cognitive theorists, the essence of personality lies in these differing ways in which unique individuals perceive situations, develop expectations about future circumstances, and display distinct behavior patterns as a result of these differing perceptions and expectations. This focus on expectancies differentiates social‐cognitive theory from behaviorism. In behaviorism, behavior was understood as being caused by reinforcements and punishments in the environment. In contrast, in social‐cognitive theory, behavior is explained in terms of people's expectations about rewards and punishments in the environment. This is an important difference. The shift to studying expectations, as opposed to merely environmental events, enables the social‐cognitive theorist to explain why two different people may react differently to the same environment. The two people may experience similar environmental events, yet develop different expectations about what is likely to happen in the future. The Self and Self‐Efficacy Beliefs Although some of our expectations concern other people, expectations of particular importance to personality functioning involve the self. Bandura (1997, 2001) has been at the forefront in emphasizing that people's expectations about their own capabilities for performance are the key ingredient in human achievement and well‐being. He refers to these expectations as perceptions of self‐efficacy. Perceived self‐efficacy, then, refers to people's perceptions of their own capabilities for action in future situations. Why are self‐efficacy perceptions so important? It is because self‐efficacy perceptions influence a number of different types of behavior that, in turn, are necessary for human achievement. Consider some area of life in which you have achieved success. For example, if you are a reader of this textbook, you probably were quite successful in high school and thereby succeeded in gaining admission to college. What was required for this success? You had to (1) decide to commit yourself to college admission, (2) persist in study in order to learn material in high school and achieve high grades, and when taking important exams, you had to (3) remain calm, and (4) think in a highly analytical manner. It is precisely these four behavioral mechanisms that are influenced by self‐efficacy perceptions (Bandura, 1997). People with a higher sense of self‐efficacy are more likely to decide to attempt difficult tasks, to persist in their efforts, to be calm rather than anxious during task performance, and to organize their thoughts in an analytical manner. In contrast, people who question their own capabilities for performance may fail even to attempt valuable activities, may give up when the going gets rough, tend to become anxious during task performance, and often become rattled and fail to think and act in a calm, analytical manner (colloquially speaking, one might say that a person with a low sense of self‐efficacy tends to choke on difficult activities). It is important to recognize that Bandura conceptualizes perceived self‐efficacy as different from self‐esteem. Self‐esteem refers to people's overall evaluation of their personal worth. Perceived self‐efficacy, in contrast, refers to people's appraisals of what they are capable of accomplishing in a specific situation. Sometimes people with high ability lack perceived self‐efficacy. Adele is one of the most talented and successful musical artists of the 21st century. Yet, for a period of time after her Grammy Award winning Album, 21, she developed self‐doubts: “I lost my confidence … for a while I was just a mum.” Adele reported that she was ‘frightened’ by her album's success and, for a while “didn't believe in [herself].” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article‐3329116/Adele‐reveals‐struggled‐believe‐music‐removing‐spotlight‐three‐years‐raise‐son.html A second distinction of importance concerns the difference between self‐efficacy expectations and outcome expectations (Bandura, 1977). Outcome expectations are beliefs about rewards and punishments that will occur if one performs a given type of behavior. Self‐efficacy expectations are beliefs about whether one can perform the behavior in the first place. Suppose that you are considering what major to choose in college. You might believe that there are high rewards (e.g., high financial income in the future) if you were to major in electrical engineering. You would, then, have high outcome expectations with respect to electrical engineering. But you might also think that you are not personally capable of executing the behaviors (e.g., passing all the math, physics, and engineering courses) required to major in electrical engineering. You would have low self‐efficacy expectations with respect to electrical engineering. Social‐cognitive theory contends that efficacy expectations generally are more important than are outcome expectations as a determinant of behavior. If people lack a sense of efficacy for accomplishing something, the rewards associated with accomplishing that goal are probably irrelevant to them. You are unlikely to select electrical engineering as your major, despite its financial attractions, if you have a low sense of self‐efficacy for completing the required courses. In terms of assessment, Bandura emphasizes what he calls a microanalytic research strategy. According to this strategy, detailed measures of perceived self‐efficacy are taken before performance of behaviors in specific situations. Specifically, people are asked to indicate their degree of certainty in performing specific behaviors in designated contexts. A self‐efficacy scale for athletic performance in, for example, the sport of basketball would not ask a vague question such as “Do you think you are a good basketball player?” (The question is vague because the word “good” is so ambiguous: Good compared to your teammates? Compared to an NBA player? Compared to your little brother?) Instead, test items describe specific actions and accomplishments and ask people to indicate their confidence in attaining them: For example, “How confident are you that you can make at least 75% of your free throws during a basketball game?” or “How confident are you that you can dribble upcourt with a basketball even if you are covered by a skilled defensive player?” This assessment strategy follows directly from the theoretical considerations above. In terms of theory, Bandura recognizes that self‐efficacy perceptions may vary, for any individual, from one situation to another. In terms of assessment methods, then, situation‐specific measures are employed in order to capture this variability. Such measures are much better for capturing the psychological characteristics of the individual. Global self‐concept measures are criticized because they “[do] not do justice to the complexity of self‐efficacy perceptions, which vary across different activities, different levels of the same activity, and different situational circumstances” (Bandura, 1986, p. 41). Self‐Efficacy and Performance A basic claim of social‐cognitive theory is that self‐efficacy perceptions causally influence behavior. If you think critically about such claims, you may already have a counterargument: Maybe self‐efficacy perceptions do not really play a causal role. Maybe some other factor is really the cause. Another possible factor is a person's actual level of skill. Skill levels might influence both self‐efficacy perceptions and behavior and account for the relation between perceived self‐efficacy and motivated action. For example, everyone has a high sense of self‐efficacy for picking up a 5‐pound weight (we're confident that we can do it) and a low sense of self‐efficacy for picking up a 500‐pound weight (we perceive ourselves as incapable of doing it). But there's no need to appeal to the notion of perceived self‐efficacy to explain why we actually can lift the light weight and not the heavy one. Our behavior can be understood simply in terms of our inherent physical capacities. How, then, do we know that we ever need to appeal to the notion of perceived self‐efficacy to explain behavior? Social‐cognitivists have addressed this question through experimental strategies. The idea is to experimentally manipulate perceived self‐efficacy while holding other factors—such as people's actual skills—constant. Once self‐efficacy perceptions are manipulated experimentally, one can see whether the variations in perceived self‐efficacy causally influence behavior. Of course, one needs a strategy for manipulating perceived self‐efficacy. Ideally, the manipulation would be simple and subtle, to ensure that it influenced perceived self‐efficacy but did not also influence people's actual skills on the task. One research strategy has been to employ a technique known as “anchoring” manipulations. Anchoring refers to a thinking process that comes into play when people try to figure out the answer to a problem. What often happens is that the final answer that people reach is greatly influenced by whatever people happen to think of first when they try to solve the problem; their final answer is “anchored on” their initial guess. Surprisingly, this occurs even when the initial guess is determined by factors that are completely random and obviously irrelevant to the problem (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). For example, imagine you are trying to guess a numerical quantity such as the population in millions of the nation of Russia. Suppose that just before you make your estimate, someone pulls a random number out of a hat, reads it aloud—“639”—and then asks, “Do you think there are more or less than 639 million people living in Russia?” You would know that 639 is way too high, and you would know that it also is irrelevant to the real answer because it was chosen randomly. Nonetheless, if you respond like most research participants in anchoring studies, when you then guessed the actual population, your guess would be much higher than if you never had been exposed to the random value. (“Hmm,” you might think, “it can't be 639 million. Um … maybe it's 400 million.”) Your final guess would be “anchored” in the direction of the large number. Conversely, if you first were exposed to a low anchor value (e.g., in our population example, the value 20 million), your final guess would probably end up lower. (“Hmm, 20 million, that can't be right. Maybe it's, um … 70 million.”) The presentation of random anchor values, then, is a way of experimentally manipulating people's judgments. Cervone and Peake (1986) applied anchoring techniques to the question of self‐efficacy judgment and behavior. Prior to performing a task that had a series of items, participants were asked to judge whether they could solve “more or less than X” of the items. In high and low anchor conditions, the “X” was a number that corresponded to a high versus low level of performance. This number appeared to be random, literally drawn out of a hat. People then judged exactly how many items they could solve (their level of self‐efficacy on the task). Findings indicated that the anchoring manipulation affected perceived self‐efficacy; participants exposed to high and low random numbers had high and low self‐efficacy perceptions (Figure 12.1, left panel). This circumstance, then, is exactly what one needs to test the claim that self‐efficacy causally influences behavior; thanks to the anchoring manipulation, people differ in perceived self‐efficacy while being the same on other factors, such as actual skills on the task. To provide this test, the experimenters asked people to work on the task and measured their behavioral persistence (i.e., how long they tried working on the problems before giving up). Variations in self‐efficacy were found to create corresponding variations in behavior (Figure 12.1, right panel). The groups that had high versus low self‐efficacy perceptions differed in their subsequent behavior—even though the high versus low differences were created experimentally and merely by presenting random anchor values. FIGURE 12.1 Mean levels of perceived self‐efficacy and behavior as a function of exposure to apparently random high versus low anchor values. Source: Cervone & Peake, 1986. Such findings provide strong evidence for a central aspect of social‐cognitive theory, namely, that people's subjective perceptions of themselves have a unique causal influence on their own behavior. Even when a seemingly irrelevant situational factor causes people to have relatively high or low judgments of self‐efficacy, these judgments can affect subsequent decisions and actions. Self‐efficacy beliefs also influence how people cope with disappointments and stress in the pursuit of life goals. Research generally suggests that human functioning is facilitated by a personal sense of control (Schwarzer, 1992). Self‐efficacy beliefs represent one aspect of such a sense of control. A study of women coping with abortion demonstrated the importance of self‐efficacy beliefs in coping with stressful life events (Cozzarelli, 1993). In this research, women about to obtain an abortion completed questionnaire measures of personality variables such as self‐esteem and optimism, as well as a self‐efficacy scale measuring expectations concerning successful post abortion coping. For example, the scale included items asking about whether the women thought they would be able to spend time around children or babies comfortably and whether they would continue to have good sexual relations following abortion. Following abortion and then three weeks later, measures of mood and depression were obtained (e.g., the degree to which the women were feeling depressed, regretful, relieved, guilty, sad, good). The results clearly supported the hypothesis that self‐efficacy was a key determinant of post abortion adjustment. The contribution of personality variables such as self‐esteem and optimism was also related to post abortion adjustment. However, their effects appeared to occur through their contribution to feelings of self‐efficacy. In sum, perceptions of self‐efficacy have been shown to have diverse effects on experience and action, in the following ways: Selection: Self‐efficacy beliefs influence the goals individuals select (e.g., individuals with high self‐efficacy beliefs select more difficult, challenging goals than do those with low self‐efficacy beliefs). Effort, persistence, and performance: Individuals with high self‐efficacy beliefs show greater effort and persistence and perform better relative to individuals with low self‐efficacy beliefs (Stajkovic & Luthans, 1998). Emotion: Individuals with high self‐efficacy beliefs approach tasks with better moods (i.e., less anxiety and depression) than individuals with low self‐efficacy beliefs. Coping: Individuals with high self‐efficacy beliefs are better able to cope with stress and disappointments than are individuals with low self‐efficacy beliefs. Bandura summarizes the evidence concerning the effects of self‐efficacy beliefs on motivation and performance as follows: “Human betterment has been advanced more by persisters than by pessimists. Self‐belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self‐disbelief assuredly spawns failure” (1997, p. 77). Although self‐efficacy beliefs are discussed here in the section on structure, one can correctly infer that they play an important role in the social‐cognitive view of motivation. Goals The third type of personality structure in social‐cognitive theory is goals. A goal is a mental representation of the aim of an action or course of actions. A basic tenet of social‐cognitive theory is that people's ability to envision the future enables them to set specific goals for action and, thus, to motivate and direct their own behavior. Goals, then, contribute to the human capacity for self‐control. Goals guide us in establishing priorities and in selecting among situations. They enable us to go beyond momentary influences and to organize our behavior over extended periods of time. A person's goals are organized in a system. In a goal system, some goals are more central or important than others. Goal systems often are understood as having a hierarchical structure. Goals at a higher level in the hierarchy (e.g., get accepted into law school) organize lower‐level goals (e.g., get good grades in college), which, in turn, organize lower‐level aims (e.g., study for exams). Goal systems, however, are not rigid or fixed. People may select among goals, depending on what seems most important to them at the time, what the opportunities in the environment appear to be, and their judgments of self‐efficacy for goal attainment. People's goals on a task may differ in a variety of ways (Locke & Latham, 1990, 2002). One obvious variation is in the level of challenge, or difficulty, of goals. For example, in a college class, some people may have the goal merely of passing the course, whereas others may adopt the challenging goal of getting an A in the class. Another variation involves the nearness, or proximity, of goals. One person may set a proximal goal, that is, a goal that involves an aim that is coming up soon. Others may set distal goals, that is, goals that specify achievements that are far in the future. For example, if one's goal is to lose weight, a proximal goal might be losing 1 pound each week, whereas a distal goal would be losing 12 pounds in the next 3 months. Research findings indicate that proximal goals often have a bigger influence on one's current behavior than do distal goals (Bandura & Schunk, 1981; Stock & Cervone, 1990). In part, this is because distal goals allow one to “slack off” in the present. For example, the person who wants to lose 12 pounds in 3 months might convince herself that she can go off her diet 1 week and still meet the long‐term aim. In addition, goals may differ in a manner that involves the subjective meaning of an activity. On any challenging task, some people may have the goal of developing more knowledge and skills on the task; the meaning of the task is that it is an opportunity to learn. Others, in contrast, may be more concerned with goals such as not embarrassing themselves in front of others. These differences between “learning” and “performance” goals (Dweck & Leggett, 1988) are discussed in Chapter 13. Goals are related to the previous social‐cognitive personality construct: expectancies. Expectancies influence the process of goal setting. When selecting goals, people generally reflect on their expectations about their performance. People with higher perceptions of self‐efficacy often set higher goals and remain more committed to them (Locke & Latham, 2002). Conversely, goals may influence expectancies and may interact systematically with expectancies as people work on tasks and receive feedback on their performance (Grant & Dweck, 1999). For example, suppose that you take an exam and learn that your score was identical to the average score in the class. If your goal was merely to learn something about the course material and to earn a passing grade, then you might be perfectly satisfied with your performance. However, if your goal was to perform exceptionally well in the course in order to impress your friends and your professor, then you might interpret the average grade very negatively and become discouraged, especially if your expectations are that you no longer can achieve your ultimate aims in the course. Evaluative Standards The fourth personality structure in social‐cognitive theory is evaluative standards. A mental standard is a criterion for judging the goodness, or worth, of a person, thing, or event. The study of evaluative standards, then, addresses the ways in which people acquire criteria for evaluating events and how these evaluations influence their emotions and actions. Of particular importance in social‐cognitive theory are evaluative standards concerning one's self, or “personal standards”. Personal standards are fundamental to human motivation and performance. Social‐cognitive theory recognizes that people commonly evaluate their ongoing behavior in accordance with internalized personal standards. As an example, imagine that you are writing a term paper for a course. What are you thinking about? On the one hand, you have in mind the content of the material for the paper: the main facts you have to cover, the thesis you are trying to develop, and so forth. On the other hand, inevitably you will find yourself thinking of something else. You will be thinking about the quality of your own writing. You will evaluate whether the sentences you have written are good enough or have to be revised. In other words, you have in mind evaluative standards that you use to judge the goodness or worth of your own behavior. Much of the writing and revising process is one in which you try to alter your own behavior (i.e., your writing) to bring it in line with your own personal standards for writing. Evaluative standards often trigger emotional reactions. We react with pride when we meet our standards for performance, and we are dissatisfied with ourselves when we fail to meet our own standards. Bandura refers to such emotions as self‐evaluative reactions; we evaluate our own actions and then respond in an emotionally satisfied or dissatisfied way toward ourselves as a result of this self‐evaluation (Bandura, 1986). These emotional reactions constitute self‐reinforcements and are important in maintaining behavior over extended periods of time, particularly in the absence of external reinforcers. Thus, through such internal self‐evaluative responses as praise and guilt, we are able to reward ourselves for meeting standards and to punish ourselves for violating them. Social‐cognitive theory thus emphasizes that evaluative standards are central to behavior that we call “moral” versus “immoral”. Some of the evaluative standards that we learn involve ethical and moral principles concerning the treatment of other people. Although everyone in a given society may be familiar with such principles, sometimes people do not use them to regulate their own behavior. For example, everyone knows that it is wrong to steal things from a store or to include plagiarized material in a term paper, yet some people still do these things; they selectively “disengage” their moral standards when it is to their personal advantage to do so (Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, & Pastorelli, 1996). People who disengage their moral standards say things to themselves that temporarily enable them to disregard their own standards for behavior. For example, a student who is tempted to cheat on a test might say something like “Everybody cheats on tests, so it must be ok.” The disengagement of evaluative standards enables people to perform acts that they normally would not perform due to internalized moral sanctions. A study by Osofsky, Bandura, and Zimbardo (2005) provides a striking example of this point. The evaluative standard of relevance to their study was the moral sanction against killing a fellow human being. Everyone possesses moral standards indicating that killing is wrong. Yet some people in U.S. society kill people as part of their profession; they are executioners who carry out death penalties. How do they do it? How can people who, in general, believe that killing is bad execute prisoners? To answer this question, Osofsky et al. studied personnel who work at maximum‐security prisons. Prison personnel differed in the degree to which they were involved in the execution process. Some personnel were relatively uninvolved in executions (e.g., they counseled the prisoner's family members), whereas others were highly involved (e.g., they administered lethal injections). Osofsky et al. asked all participants to complete a scale measuring the tendency to disengage from moral standards involving executions. They found that the degree to which people displayed moral disengagement varied as a function of their level of involvement in executions. Prison personnel who were directly involved in executions displayed much higher levels of moral disengagement than did others; they were more likely to endorse statements such as “An execution is merciful compared to a murder” and “Nowadays the death penalty is done in ways that minimize the suffering of the person being executed” (Osofsky et al., 2005). Such statements enable one temporarily to disregard, or “disengage,” prohibitions against killing. The study of evaluative standards is another point that differentiates social‐cognitive theory from behaviorism. In a behavioristic experiment, the experimenter determines the evaluative standards. He or she decides that a given number of lever presses by a rat, for example, are enough presses to receive a reinforcement. Social‐cognitive theorists note that such experiments fail to address a basic fact of human life. In the human case, evaluative standards are not always set by an outside agent. They are determined by the individual. People have their own personal standards for evaluating their own behavior. Ongoing behavior, then, is determined by this internal psychological system, not by forces in the environment, as the behaviorists had argued. The Nature of Social‐Cognitive Personality Structures In social‐cognitive theory, the four personality structures we have reviewed—beliefs and expectancies, goals, evaluative standards, and competencies and skills—are not treated as four independent “objects” in one's mind. Instead, these four personality structures should be understood as referring to distinct classes of thinking. Each of the four is a cognitive subsystem within the overall system of personality. The theoretical claim is that cognitions about what the world actually is like (beliefs), about one's aims for the future (goals), and about how things normatively should be (standards) play distinct roles in personality functioning and, thus, should be treated as distinct personality structures. Similarly, the declarative and procedural knowledge that gives people the capacity to act in an intelligent, skilled manner (competencies) is seen as being psychologically distinct from beliefs, goals, and evaluative standards and, thus, as constituting a distinct personality structure. Given this view of cognition and personality, the social‐cognitive theorist would never assign to a person a single score that is supposed to represent “how much” of each variable the person has. Social‐cognitive theorists believe that personality is far too complex to be reduced to any simple set of scores. Instead, each of these four personality structures refers to a complex system of social cognition. People have a large number of goals, a wide spectrum of beliefs, an array of evaluative standards, and a diversity of skills. Different personality structures come into play in different social situations. By studying this complex system of social‐cognitive structures, and its interaction with the social world, the social‐cognitive theorist tries to grapple with the true complexity of the individual. Social‐Cognitive Theory of Personality: Process Social‐cognitive theory addresses the dynamics of personality processes in two different ways. The first involves general theoretical principles. Social‐cognitive theorists have presented two theoretical principles that they think scientists should use when analyzing the dynamics of personality processes. One is an analysis of the causes of behavior, which is called reciprocal determinism. The other is a framework for thinking about internal personality processes, which is called a cognitive–affective processing system (CAPS) framework. After we review these two ideas—reciprocal determinism and the CAPS model—we will consider the second way in which social‐cognitive theory addresses personality processes. By way of preview, this second way is by analyzing psychological functions that are of particular importance in a scientific analysis of personality and individual differences. Three types of psychological functions have received particular attention: (1) observational learning (or learning through “modeling”), (2) motivation, and (3) self‐control. Reciprocal Determinism

Bandura ( 1986 ) has introduced a theoretical principle known as  reciprocal determinism . This principle addresses the issue of cause and effect in the study of personality processes.

The problem Bandura is trying to solve is the following. When analyzing a person's behavior, one generally needs to consider three factors: the person, his or her behavior, and the environmental setting in which the person acts. In this three‐part system, how are we to analyze causes and effects? What causes what? Should one say that the person, with his or her personality attributes, is the cause of behavior (as implied in some trait theories of personality)? Should one say that the environment is the real cause of behavior (as argued by the behaviorists)? Bandura thinks we should not say either of these things because both statements are too simplistic. Instead, he argues that causality is a “two‐way street.” Stated more formally, causality is reciprocal. The three factors under consideration—behavior, personality characteristics, and the environment—are each a cause of one another. The factors are reciprocal determinants. Bandura's principle of reciprocal determinism, then, contends that personality, behavior, and the environment must be understood as a system of forces that mutually influence one another across the course of time.

To understand this principle intuitively, imagine yourself in conversation with someone whom you find attractive. You might smile, look attentive, and try to alter the topics of conversation in a manner that makes a good impression on the other person. Now, from the perspective of a personality scientist, how are we to understand causality in this conversation? What causes what? On the one hand, one could say that the environment causes your behavior. The other person's physical and social attractiveness has caused you to act in a certain way. This is not incorrect; yet it is insufficient. The environment is something that you interpreted, and your particular interpretations are influenced by beliefs and feelings of yours—that is, your personality characteristics. Further, your ability to make a good impression depends on your social skills—another feature of your personality. In addition, your behavior alters the environment you experience. If you skillfully make a good impression, then the other person will be in a better mood, will like you more, will be smiling, will be attentive to you, and so on. In other words, through your own actions, you will have created a more positive social environment. Finally, if you are successful, your behavioral success may alter your mood and your sense of self; there will be an influence of your own behavior on your own personality. It is futile to isolate one factor as “the cause” and the other as “the effect” in such a system. Instead, personality, behavior, and the environment must be understood as factors that reciprocally determine one another.

Reciprocal Determinism. Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory principle of reciprocal determinism contrasts with Behaviorism ( Chapter 10 ), which attempted to explain behavior and experience solely in terms of environmental influences. Adapted from Bandura (1978).

The principle of reciprocal determinism constitutes a rejection of the views of other theories. Some theories explain behavior primarily in terms of inner forces: the inner conflicts of psychoanalysis, the motive for self‐actualization of the phenomenological theories, the genetically determined dispositions of the trait theories, and the evolved psychological modules of evolutionary psychology. Others explain behavior in terms of external forces—behaviorism being the paradigm case. Bandura rejects this entire discourse about “inner versus outer” or “internal versus external” forces as woefully inadequate because it fails to recognize that the person's internal psychology and the social environment influence one another reciprocally. People are influenced by environmental forces, but they also choose how to behave. The person is both responsive to situations and actively constructs and influences situations. People select situations as well as are shaped by them; social‐cognitive theorists regard the capacity to choose the type of situation that one will encounter as a critical element of people's capacity to be active agents influencing the course of their own development.

Personality as A Cognitive–Affective Processing System (CAPS)

In recent years, social‐cognitive theorists increasingly have emphasized that personality should be understood as a system. The term system generally refers to something that has a large number of interacting parts. The behavior of the system reflects not only the isolated parts but also the ways in which the parts are interconnected. Systems with a very large number of highly integrated parts often exhibit highly complex and coherent forms of behavior, even if the parts are relatively simple. Dynamic interactions among the parts give rise to the system's complexity. An example of this is the brain. It performs remarkably complex actions despite the fact that its parts—neurons—are relatively simple. The complex interconnections among the parts give rise to the brain's complex capabilities (Damasio,  1994 ; Edelman & Tononi,  2000 ).

Social‐cognitive theory views personality as a complex system. Social‐cognitive variables do not operate in isolation from one another. Instead, the various cognitions and affects interact with one another in an organized fashion; as a result, there is an overall coherence to personality functioning (Cervone & Shoda,  1999b ).

A systems view of structure has been articulated by Mischel and Shoda ( 2008 ). They present a  cognitive–affective processing system (CAPS)  model of personality. The CAPS model has three essential features. First, cognitive and emotional personality variables are seen as being complexly linked to one another. It is not merely the case that people have a goal (e.g., get more dates), a level of competency (e.g., low dating skills), a particular expectancy (e.g., low perceived self‐efficacy for dating), and certain evaluative standards and self‐evaluative reactions (e.g., feeling emotionally dissatisfied with oneself when it comes to dating). Instead, their personality system features these cognitions and affects and interrelations among them. Thoughts about one's goals may trigger thoughts about skills, which in turn trigger thoughts about self‐efficacy, all of which may affect one's self‐evaluations and emotions.

The second key feature of the CAPS model concerns the social environment. In this model, different aspects of social situations, or “situational features,” activate subsets of the overall personality system. For example, a situation in which you are in a conversation with someone about a date they had last weekend may activate the system of goals and expectancies involving dates outlined in the preceding paragraph. In contrast, a conversation about politics, sports, or classes at school may activate an entirely different set of cognitions and affects.

The CAPS model. In the CAPS model of Mischel and Shoda, personality consists of an interacting system of cognitive and affective processes. People's encoding of features of situations that they experience activates these processes which, in turn, generate behavior. As in Bandura's model of reciprocal determinism, behaviors, in turn, influence the environment. Adapted from Mischel and Shoda (1995).

The third feature follows naturally from the second one. If different situational features activate different parts of the overall personality system, then people's behavior should vary from one situation to another. Suppose, hypothetically, that an individual's personality system contains negative thoughts and feelings about their dating skills but positive thoughts and feelings about their academic abilities. Situational features that activate one versus the other concern (dating versus academic performance) should produce, in the individual, entirely different patterns of emotion and action. Although the individual's personality system is stable, his or her experiences and action nonetheless should change from one situation to another as different subsets of the overall personality system become active. This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the CAPS model. It contends that not only average levels of behavior but also variations in behavior are a defining aspect of personality.

Empirical research by Mischel and his associates illustrates the CAPS approach (Shoda, Mischel, & Wright,  1994 ). Children were observed in various settings—for example, woodworking, cabin meeting, classroom, mealtime, playground, watching TV—for six weeks during summer camp. Researchers coded the type of social interaction that occurred in each of the situations, for example, whether the given child was interacting with a peer or an adult counselor and whether the interaction was positive (e.g., child praised) or negative (e.g., child teased). The researchers also recorded the child's behavior in that situation, attending to behavior of different types: verbal aggression (e.g., provoking, threatening); physical aggression (hitting, pushing); whining or babyish behavior; complying or giving in; talking prosocially. These observations were hourly, five hours a day, six days a week, for 6 weeks—an average of 167 hours of observation per child. This yielded an extensive record of expressions of personality in social context.

When analyzing these data, the investigators plotted if–then profiles. In an if–then profile analysis, one plots an individual person's behavior in each of a variety of different situations. One then determines if the individual's behavior varies systematically from one situation to another. One might be able to determine that “if” the person encounters a particular type of situation, “then” that person tends to act in a certain manner. The “ifs” and “thens” may vary from one person to another. The profile analysis thus captures idiosyncratic tendencies exhibited by unique individuals.

What, then, were the findings? Of course, there was evidence of considerable differences in behaviors expressed in different situations. People do behave differently in different types of situations. In general, behavior is different on the playground than in the classroom, in a cabin meeting than in woodworking. And, of course, there were individual differences in average expressions of each of the five observed types of behavior. As trait theorists suggest, there are individual differences in average expressions of behavior across situations. However, the more critical question for social‐cognitive theory is whether individuals can be described in terms of their distinctive patterns of situation–behavior relationships. In other words, do individuals differ in their patterns of behavior even if their overall levels are the same? Can two individuals express the same average level of aggressive behavior, be the same on a trait such as aggressiveness, but differ in the kinds of situations in which they express their aggressiveness? Mischel and his associates indeed found clear evidence that individuals have distinctive, stable profiles of expressing particular behaviors in specific groups of situations. Consider, for example, the verbal aggression profiles of two individuals in relation to five types of psychological situations (Figure 12.2). Clearly, the two differ in their profiles of expressing verbal aggression across the various situations. Each behaves reasonably consistently within specific groups of situations but differently between groups of situations. Averaging behavior across situations would mask such distinctive patterns of situation–behavior relationships. FIGURE 12.2 Illustrative intra individual profiles of verbal aggression for two individuals across five types of psychological situations. Adapted from Shoda, Mischel, & Wright, 1994, p. 6. Interestingly, laypersons—that is, people who are not trained professionally in psychology—appear naturally to recognize the importance of if …then … variability in action. This was demonstrated in recent studies by Kammrath, Mendoza‐Denton, and Mischel (2005). In one study, laypersons were asked how they expected people with different personality characteristics to behave in different situations. Results indicated that laypersons did not anticipate that people would act in a uniform, consistent manner in different contexts. Instead, they anticipated if–then variability; they expected that people's behavior would vary substantially from one situation to another. In a second study, participants were told about the actions of individuals whose behavior varied distinctively across different situations. Research participants were not befuddled by these violations of traitlike consistency in behavior. Instead, they inferred that people possessed motives that explained their patterns of variability in conduct (Kammrath et al., 2005). What can be concluded from this program of research? Mischel and his associates suggest that individuals have distinctive profiles of situation–behavior relationships, which are called behavioral signatures. “It is this type of intra individual stability in the pattern and organization of behavior that seems especially central for a psychology of personality ultimately devoted to understanding and capturing the uniqueness of individual functioning” (Shoda, Mischel, & Wright, 1994, p. 683). Mischel and colleagues emphasized that these unique patterns of behavior would be completely overlooked if one merely asked about people's overall, average behavioral tendencies. Two people who, for example, display the same average level of anxiety may be fundamentally different people. An if–then profile analysis might reveal that one person is anxious in achievement settings and the other is anxious when it comes to romantic relationships. The analysis would indicate that the different people have different personality dynamics—despite the fact that they might happen to get the same score on “global trait anxiety” if a researcher averages together their responses in the different situations of their lives. The basic message Mischel and colleagues send to other psychologists, then, is this: Don't average together the different situations of their lives! Instead, look closely at individuals and the distinctive patterns of variability in action that they display in different circumstances. To summarize the social‐cognitive view of motivation, a person develops goals or standards that serve as the basis for action. People consider alternative courses of action and make decisions on the basis of the anticipated outcomes (external and internal) and the perceived self‐efficacy for performing the necessary behaviors. Once action has been taken, the outcome is assessed in terms of the external rewards from others and one's own internal self‐evaluations. Successful performance may lead to enhanced self‐efficacy and either a relaxation of effort or the setting of higher standards for further effort. Unsuccessful performance or failure may lead to giving up or continued striving, depending on the value of the outcome to an individual and to his or her sense of self‐efficacy in relation to further effort. Social‐Cognitive Theory of Growth and Development Observational Learning (Modeling) So far, we have outlined four personality structures that are central to social‐cognitive theory and have reviewed two theoretical principles that Bandura and Mischel use to understand the nature of personality and the causes of behavior. We now can see these theoretical ideas put into action. Social‐cognitive theorists use these theoretical principles to understand two main psychological activities, or what we will call here two psychological functions: (1) acquiring new knowledge and skills, particularly through processes of observational learning and (2) exerting control over, or self‐regulating, one's own actions and emotional experiences. The first of these two psychological functions concerns the question of how people acquire knowledge and skills. How do we learn social skills? How do we acquire particular beliefs, goals, and standards for evaluating our behavior? Previous theories commonly have overlooked these questions. There is little explicit discussion of the acquisition of beliefs and social skills in most of the previous theories we have discussed. The theory that addressed the topic most explicitly was behaviorism. As you will recall, behaviorists claim that people learn things through a trial‐and‐error learning process called shaping, or successive approximation. Over a large series of learning trials, reinforcements gradually shape a complex pattern of behavior. Although there are lots of errors at first, through reinforcement processes, behavior gradually approximates a desired pattern. In a profoundly important development for psychology, Albert Bandura succeeded in explaining the shortcomings of this behavioral theory and in providing psychology with an alternative theoretical explanation. In retrospect, the shortcomings of the behavioral approach seem obvious. Sometimes, learning simply cannot be through trial and error because the errors are too costly. As an example, consider the first time you ever drove a car. According to the behaviorists, reinforcements and punishments would gradually shape your safe driving behavior. On Day 1 of driving, you might get into 9 or 10 traffic accidents, but due to reinforcement processes on Day 2, you might only have 5 or 6 accidents, and after a few more trials, the errors would disappear and the environment would have shaped safe driving behavior. Is this what actually happened? We sure hope not! In reality, the first time you sat behind the wheel—before you ever had been reinforced or punished for specific driving behaviors—you already were able to drive a car fairly adequately. What needs to be explained is the human capacity to learn such skills in the absence of prior rewards and punishments. Social‐cognitive theory explains that people can learn merely by observing the behaviors of others. The person being observed is called a model, and this observational learning process is also known as modeling. People's cognitive capacities enable them to learn complex forms of behavior merely by observing a model performing these behaviors. As Bandura (1986) has detailed, people can form an internal mental representation of the behavior they have observed and then can draw upon that mental representation at a later time. Learning by modeling is evident in innumerable domains of life. A child may learn language by observing parents and other people speaking. You may have learned some of the basic skills for driving (where to put your hands and feet, how to start the car, how to turn the wheel) merely by observing other drivers. People learn what types of behavior are acceptable and unacceptable in different social settings by observing the actions of others. What's on? Bandura's research on observational learning drew attention to the possibility that children were learning negative patterns of behavior, such as aggression, merely by watching TV. This modeling process can be much more complex than simple imitation or mimicry. The notion of “imitation” generally implies the exact replication of a narrow response pattern. In modeling, however, people may learn general rules of behavior by observing others. They then can use those rules to self‐direct a variety of types of behavior in the future. Bandura's conceptualization of modeling also is narrower than the psychodynamic notion of identification. Identification implies an incorporation of broad patterns of behavior exhibited by a specific other individual. Modeling, in contrast, involves the acquisition of information through observation of others, without implying that the observer internalizes entire styles of action exhibited by the other individual. The individual who is observed in the process of observational learning (i.e., the model) need not be someone who is physically present. In contemporary society, much modeling occurs through the media. We may learn styles of thought and action from people whom we never meet but whom we merely observe on television or other media sources. A social concern is that television often models antisocial behavior such as aggression; research indicates that exposure to high levels of aggression in the media when one is a child can cause people to learn aggressive patterns of behavior that are evident later in life. Huesmann and colleagues (Huesmann, Moise‐Titus, Podolski, & Eron, 2003) performed a long‐term longitudinal study on the question of whether exposure to violence in the media during childhood leads to higher levels of aggression later in life. Among both men and women, people who witnessed high levels of violence when they were 6–10 years old turned out to be more aggressive in early adulthood. The link between media violence in childhood and aggression in adulthood held up even when the researchers statistically controlled for factors other than media exposure (e.g., socioeconomic status) that might possibly be correlated with levels of aggression. Bandura's research on modeling clearly has important social implications. Acquisition versus Performance An important part of the theory of modeling is the distinction between acquisition and performance. A new, complex pattern of behavior can be learned or acquired regardless of reinforcers, but whether or not the behavior is performed will depend on rewards and punishments. Consider, for example, the classic study by Bandura and his associates to illustrate this distinction (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963). In this study, three groups of children observed a model expressing aggressive behavior toward a plastic Bobo doll. In the first group, the aggressive behavior by the model was not followed by any consequences (No Consequences); in the second group, the model's aggressive behavior was followed by rewards (Reward); and in the third group it was followed by punishment (Punishment). Following observation of the model's aggressive behavior, children from the three groups were presented with two conditions. In the first condition, the children were left alone in a room with many toys, including a Bobo doll. They were then observed through a one‐way mirror to see if they would express the aggressive behaviors of the model (No Incentive condition). In the next condition, the children were given attractive incentives for reproducing the model's behavior (Positive Incentive condition). Two relevant questions can be asked. First, did the children behave aggressively when they were given an incentive to do so as opposed to when they were not? Many more imitative aggressive behaviors were shown in the Incentive condition than in the No Incentive condition (Figure 12.3). In other words, the children had learned (acquired) many aggressive behaviors that were not performed under the No Incentive condition but were performed under the Incentive condition. This result demonstrated the use of the distinction between acquisition and performance. Second, did the consequences to the model affect the children's display of aggressive behavior? Observation of behavior in the No Incentive condition indicated clear differences; children who observed the model being punished performed far fewer imitative acts than did children in the model Rewarded and No Consequences groups (Figure 12.3). This difference, however, was wiped out by offering the children attractive incentives for reproducing the model's behavior (Positive Incentive). In sum, the consequences to the model had an effect on the children's performance of the aggressive acts but not on the learning of them. FIGURE 12.3 Mean number of different imitative responses reproduced by children as a function of response consequences to the model and positive incentives. Bandura (1965). Copyright 1965 by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted by permission. Vicarious Conditioning A number of other studies have since demonstrated that the observation of consequences to a model affects performance but not acquisition. The difference between acquisition and performance suggests, however, that in some way the children were being affected by what happened to the model; that is, either on a cognitive basis, on an emotional basis, or both, the children were responding to the consequences to the model. The suggestion here is that the children learned certain emotional responses by sympathizing with the model, that is, vicariously by observing the model. Not only can behavior be learned through observation, but emotional reactions such as fear and joy can also be conditioned on a vicarious basis: “It is not uncommon for individuals to develop strong emotional reactions toward places, persons, and things without having had any personal contact with them” (Bandura, 1986, p. 185). The process of learning emotional reactions through observing others, known as vicarious conditioning, has been demonstrated in both humans and animals. Thus, human subjects who observed a model expressing a conditioned fear response were found to develop a vicariously conditioned emotional response to a previously neutral stimulus (Bandura & Rosenthal, 1966). Similarly, in an experiment with animals, it was found that an intense and persistent fear of snakes developed in younger monkeys who observed their parents behave fearfully in the presence of real or toy snakes. What was particularly striking about this research is that the period of observation of their parents' emotional reaction was sometimes very brief. Further, once the vicarious conditioning took place, the fear was found to be intense, long lasting, and present in situations different from those in which the emotional reaction was first observed (Mineka, Davidson, Cook, & Kleir, 1984). Although observational learning can be a powerful process, one should not think that it is automatic or that one is bound to follow in the footsteps of others. Children, for example, have multiple models and can learn from parents, siblings, teachers, peers, and television. In addition, they learn from their own direct experience. Beyond this, as children get older, they may actively select which models they will observe and attempt to emulate. Self‐Regulation and Motivation As we have just reviewed, one central personality process in social‐cognitive theory is the acquisition of knowledge and skills, which is commonly accomplished through observational learning. A second process concerns putting that knowledge into action. In other words, it involves questions of human motivation. Social‐cognitive theory addresses human motivation primarily by examining the motivational impact of thoughts related to oneself, or self‐referent thinking. The general idea is that people commonly guide and motivate their own actions through their thinking processes. Key thinking processes often involve the self. Consider your own motivational processes as they relate to this course in personality psychology. You may have enrolled in the course because you expected that you would find the material interesting. You may have calculated an expected grade you could earn in the course; in selecting this course, you may have avoided other course options in which you expected that you might earn a low grade. During the time you have been in the course, you may have set personal goals for performance in the class and may have guided your own studying by reminding yourself that “I've got to finish reading these chapters before the midterm exam!” It is these personal expectations, personal goals, and talking to oneself that social‐cognitive theory sees as being at the heart of human motivation. CURRENT APPLICATIONS Don't Blame Me—It was that Video Game! In November 2002, a teenager in the state of Wisconsin was arrested for auto theft. This was no minor case of theft: The teen was charged with stealing about a hundred vehicles! What could cause such behavior? Hostile impulses buried deep in the teen's unconscious? A lifelong trait of criminality? As reported by the Associated Press, the teenager himself had a much simpler explanation: “He had been inspired by the video game “Grand Theft Auto”. In the game, players control animated figures who violently battle law enforcement officials as they go on crime rampages, including the theft of autos. As the local police chief in Wisconsin reported, after playing this game for many hours, the teenager felt that stealing real cars would be “challenging and fun”. In the language of social‐cognitive theory, the game provided psychological models of illegal behavior, including the anticipated benefits (fun, challenge) of that behavior. This, of course, is just a single, isolated case. It does not provide scientific evidence that playing video games actually contributed to this particular teenager's behavior. Nor does it answer the key question: In general, does playing a lot of violent video games cause a person to act more violently in the real world? This question can be answered. It can be done by evaluating a large number of cases in which one can measure both game playing and real‐world aggression. One then can determine the overall degree to which exposure to violent and criminal acts in video games is related to real‐world aggressive behavior. The psychologists Craig Anderson and Brad Bushman have provided an analysis of this sort. They analyzed the results obtained in 35 research reports examining the relation between violent video game playing and various measures of real‐world aggression. Their sample included more than 4,000 participants who had taken part in both correlational studies (i.e., studies correlating game playing and aggression) and experimental studies (i.e., studies in which exposure to violence in video games was controlled experimentally). As the authors summarize, the results of their analyses “clearly support the hypothesis that exposure to violent video games poses a public‐health threat to children and youths, including college‐age individuals” (Anderson & Bushman, 2001, p. 358). In both experimental and nonexperimental studies, higher exposure to violence in video games was linked to higher levels of aggression, as well as to lower levels of prosocial behavior. The overall correlation between levels of violent game playing and levels of aggression was a little under .2. Although a correlation of this size means that there are many people who play violent video games and yet are not violent in other aspects of their life, it nonetheless is large enough to indicate that violent game playing can have a detrimental effect on large numbers of people. Subsequent research by the authors indicates one way in which game playing has its effects (Bushman & Anderson, 2002). Playing violent games produces a “hostile expectation bias”. In this experimental research, people played either a nonviolent or a violent video game. They subsequently were asked whether various interpersonal conflicts depicted in stories (that were not part of the game) involved feelings of aggression and hostility on the part of the story characters. People who had played the violent game subsequently were biased to think that the story characters were feeling and acting aggressively and were having aggressive thoughts. This result implies that people who play violent video games may, in their day‐to‐day life, more frequently think that other people around them are having hostile, aggressive thoughts. This, of course, could contribute to hostile feelings and actions on their part. It appears, then, that “fun” and “challenge” are not the only feelings created by violent video games. Sources: Anderson & Bushman, 2001; Associated Press, November 14, 2002. Bushman & Anderson, 2002. The general term for personality processes that involve the self‐directed motivation of behavior is self‐regulation (Gailliot Mead, & Baumeister, 2008). The term is meant to imply that people have the capacity to motivate themselves: to set personal goals, to plan strategies, and to evaluate and modify their ongoing behavior. Self‐regulation involves not only getting started in goal attainment but also avoiding environmental distractions and emotional impulses that might interfere with one's progress. The process of self‐regulation inherently involves all of the social‐cognitive personality structures that we have reviewed thus far. People regulate their behavior by setting personal goals and by evaluating their ongoing behavior according to evaluative standards for performance. Expectancies also are critical; in particular, high expectations of self‐efficacy may be necessary if people are to persevere in their goals despite running into setbacks along the way. In its study of self‐regulation, social‐cognitive theory emphasizes the human capacity for foresight—our ability to anticipate outcomes and make plans accordingly (Bandura, 1990). Thus, according to Bandura, “most human motivation is cognitively generated” (1992, p. 18). People vary in the standards they set for themselves. Some individuals set challenging goals, others easy goals; some individuals have very specific goals, others ambiguous goals; some emphasize short‐term, proximal goals, while others emphasize long‐range, distal goals (Cervone & Williams, 1992). In all cases, however, it is the anticipation of satisfaction with desired accomplishments and dissatisfaction with insufficient accomplishments that provides the incentives for our efforts. In this analysis, people are seen as proactive rather than as merely reactive. People set their own standards and goals, rather than merely responding to demands from the environment. Through the development of cognitive mechanisms such as expectancies, standards, and self‐evaluation, we are able to establish goals for the future and gain control over our own destiny (Bandura, 1989a, 1989b, 1990). Thus, growth and development involve changes in cognitive mechanisms associated with self‐regulation. With such development, there is increased potential for self‐regulation. Self‐Efficacy, Goals, and Self‐Evaluative Reactions Research in social‐cognitive theory has examined how these multiple personality processes—self‐efficacy perceptions, goals, and self‐evaluation of one's ongoing behavior—combine to contribute to self‐regulation. Bandura and Cervone (1983) studied the effects of goals and performance feedback on motivation. The hypothesis tested was that performance motivation reflects both the presence of goals and the awareness of how one is doing relative to standards: “Simply adopting goals, whether easy or personally challenging ones, without knowing how one is doing seems to have no appreciable motivational effects” (p. 123). The assumption was that greater discrepancies between standards and performances would generally lead to greater self‐dissatisfaction and efforts to improve performance. However, a critical ingredient of such efforts is self‐efficacy judgments. Thus, the research tested the hypothesis that self‐efficacy judgments, as well as self‐evaluative judgments, mediate between goals and goal‐directed effort. In this research, subjects performed a strenuous activity under one of four conditions: goals with feedback on their performance, goals alone, feedback alone, and absence of goals and feedback. Following this activity, described as part of a project to plan and evaluate exercise programs for postcoronary rehabilitation, subjects rated how self‐satisfied or self‐dissatisfied they would be with the same level of performance in a following session. In addition, they recorded their perceived self‐efficacy for various possible performance levels. Their effortful performance was then again measured. In accord with the hypothesis, the condition combining goals and performance feedback had a strong motivational impact, whereas neither goals alone nor feedback alone had comparable motivational significance (Figure 12.4). Also, subsequent effort was most intense when subjects were both dissatisfied with substandard performance and high on self‐efficacy judgments for good attainment. Neither dissatisfaction alone nor positive self‐efficacy judgments alone had a comparable effect. Often, effort was reduced where there were both low dissatisfaction with performance and low perceived self‐efficacy. There was, then, clear evidence that goals have motivating power through self‐evaluative and self‐efficacy judgments. FIGURE 12.4 Mean percentage increase in effortful performance under conditions varying in goals and performance feedback. Bandura and Cervone (1983). Copyright © 1983 by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted by permission. Performance feedback and self‐efficacy judgments also are important to the development of intrinsic interest. Psychologists have been able to enhance students' interest in learning and performance by helping them to break down tasks into subgoals, helping them to monitor their own performance, and providing them with feedback that increased their sense of self‐efficacy (Bandura & Schunk, 1981; Schunk & Cox, 1986). Intrinsic interest thus develops when the person has challenging standards that provide for positive self‐evaluation when met, as well as the sense of self‐efficacy in the potential for meeting those standards. It is such intrinsic interest that facilitates effort over extended periods of time in the absence of external rewards. Conversely, it is difficult to sustain motivation where one feels that the external or internal self‐evaluative rewards are insufficient or where one's sense of efficacy is so low that a positive outcome seems impossible. Self‐perceived inefficacy can nullify the motivating potential of even the most desirable outcomes. For example, no matter how attractive it might seem to become a movie star, people will not be motivated in that direction unless they feel that they have the necessary skills. In the absence of such a sense of self‐efficacy, becoming a movie star remains a fantasy rather than a goal that is pursued in action. Self‐Control and Delay of Gratification Sometimes you need to do something, but you can't get yourself to do it. For example, you might need to start working on a term paper that is due at the end of the semester, but for some reason, you can't get yourself to start actually doing the writing. It is under these circumstances that clear goals and standards for performance and a strong sense of self‐efficacy are beneficial. Now, we turn to a different type of psychological problem. Sometimes, you need to stop doing something. There may be some behavior that you find quite enjoyable, but it is socially inappropriate and/or potentially harmful to yourself or others. Smoking, overeating, and driving your car down the highway at 100 miles per hour are obvious examples. Here, the psychological challenge is the opposite of the one we analyzed above. You need to curtail the intrinsically enjoyable behavior. You need to control your impulsive reactions because, in the long run, it is better if you do not give in to them. When these cases of self‐control involve putting off something good in the present in order to attain something better in the future (e.g., not having that extra piece of pie now so that, in the future, one will be in better health), the phenomenon is referred to as “delay of gratification”. Learning Delay of Gratification Skills Research in social‐cognitive theory suggests that people's capacity to delay gratification has a social basis. Modeling and observational learning are important to the development of performance standards for success and reward that serve as a basis for delay of gratification. Children exposed to models who set high standards of performance for self‐reward tend to limit their own self‐rewards to exceptional performance to a greater degree than do children who have been exposed to models who set lower standards or to no models at all (Bandura & Kupers, 1964). Children will model standards even if they result in self‐denial of available rewards (Bandura, Grusec, & Menlove, 1967) and will also impose learned standards on other children (Mischel & Liebert, 1966). Children can be made to tolerate greater delays in receiving gratification if they are exposed to models exhibiting such delay behavior. The effects of a model on delay behavior in children are well illustrated in research by Bandura and Mischel (1965). Children found to be high and low in delay of gratification were exposed to models of the opposite behavior. In a live‐model condition, each child individually observed a testing situation in which an adult model was asked to choose between an immediate reward and a more valued object at a later date. The high‐delay children observed a model who selected the immediately available reward and commented on its benefits, whereas the low‐delay children observed a model who selected the delayed reward and commented on the virtues of delay. In a symbolic‐model condition, children read verbal accounts of these behaviors, the verbal account again being the opposite of the child's pattern of response. Finally, in a no‐model condition, children were just apprised of the choices given the adults. Following exposure to one of these three procedures, the children were again given a choice between an immediate reward and a more valuable reward. The results were that the high‐delay children in all three conditions significantly altered their delay of reward behavior in favor of immediate gratification. The live‐model condition produced the greatest effect (Figure 12.5). The low‐delay children exposed to a delay model significantly altered their behavior in terms of greater delay, but there was no significant difference between the effects of live and symbolic models. Finally, for both groups of children, the effects were found to be stable when the tests were readministered four to five weeks later. FIGURE 12.5 Mean percentage of immediate‐reward responses by high‐delay children on each of three test periods for each of three experimental conditions. Bandura & Mischel, 1965. Copyright © by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted by permission. As mentioned previously, the performance of observed behaviors clearly is influenced by the observed consequences to the model. For example, children who watch a film in which a child is not punished for playing with toys that were prohibited by the mother are more likely to play with prohibited toys than are children who see no film or see a film in which the child is punished (Walters & Parke, 1964). The old saying “Monkey see, monkey do” is not completely true. It would be more appropriate to say “Monkey sees reward or is not punished, monkey does.” After all, the monkey is no fool. Mischel's Delay of Gratification Paradigm In addition to the issue of social influences such as modeling on delay of gratification, another question involves the exact cognitive processes that enable people to control their impulses. What can you do if you want to control your impulses? What mental strategies enable people to delay gratification? Much insight into this question comes from an exceptionally informative line of research pioneered by Mischel (1974) and Metcalfe & Mischel (1999). In Mischel's delay of gratification paradigm, often described as “the marshmallow experiment,” an adult who is interacting with a young child (usually one of preschool age) informs the child that she needs to leave the child alone for a few minutes. Before leaving, the adult teaches the child a game. The game involves two different rewards. If the child can wait patiently until the adult comes back, she gets a large reward (e.g., a few marshmallows). If the child simply cannot wait for the adult to return, the child can ring a bell and the adult will return immediately; however, if this happens, the child earns only a smaller reward (e.g., one marshmallow). The child, then, can earn the larger reward only by delaying gratification. The dependent measure is how long children are able to wait before ringing the bell. A critical experimental manipulation in this setting is whether children can see the reward—or, phrased more technically, whether the rewards are available for attention. In one experimental condition, children could see the rewards. In another, the rewards were not available for attention; they simply were covered up. This simple experimental manipulation proved to have a huge effect on children's delay abilities. When the rewards were covered up, most children were able to wait a relatively long time. But when the children were looking at the rewards, they had an enormously hard time controlling their impulses. It appears that looking at rewards that one is not supposed to have primarily is a frustrating experience that children have a hard time handling (Mischel, 1974). Being unable to look at the rewards, then, makes the situation easier to handle. Subsequent work showed that the key factor in delay of gratification is what is going on in children's minds as they try to wait for the large reward. Children do well at the task if they employ cognitive strategies that distract them from the attractive qualities of the rewards. If children are taught to think about how marshmallows resemble some nonfood object (e.g., clouds), or are asked to form mental images in which they think of the rewards as if they are merely photos rather than real things, or are taught to sing songs to themselves or play other mentally distracting games during the delay period, then they are able to delay gratification even if the rewards are in sight (Mischel & Baker, 1975; Mischel & Moore, 1973; Moore, Mischel, & Zeiss, 1976). “Thus, what is in the children's heads—not what is physically in front of them—crucially affects their ability to purposefully sustain delay in order to achieve their preferred but delayed goals… . If the children imagine the real objects as present they cannot wait long for them. In contrast, if they imagine pictures of the objects, they can wait for long time periods” (Mischel, 1990, p. 123). Imagining a mere picture of the object is a “cool” encoding (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999), that is, a way of thinking about the stimulus that does not activate “hot,” impulsive emotional systems. People seem more capable of controlling their emotional reactions, then, when they focus their attention on less emotional features of a given situation. The impact of “hot” versus “cool” encoding for interpersonal behavior is reviewed in Chapter 14. Mischel's delay of gratification findings vividly illustrate the human capacity for self‐control. It is instructive to contrast his social‐cognitive approach with behaviorism. The behaviorist looking at Mischel's paradigm might have argued that the main determinant of children's behavior would be the reward contingencies. The problem with that argument is that children in the different experimental conditions all had exactly the same reward contingencies; they all got the same small and large rewards based on the same behavior. Mischel's research, then, illustrates the power of something that classic behaviorism never thought of, namely, mental representations of rewards. Do individual differences in delay of gratification ability in childhood persist into later years of life? To find out, researchers studied children in the delay studies years later, when they were adolescents. They related delay of gratification scores in preschool to adolescent measures of cognitive and social competence (as rated by parents) and to the adolescents' verbal and quantitative SAT scores. Childhood delay of gratification ability predicted adolescent outcomes, with high‐delay children becoming adolescents who were more able to control their emotions and who obtained higher SAT scores (Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990). CURRENT QUESTIONS What Does the Marshmallow Test Measure and What are Its Social Policy Implications? Mischel's marshmallow experiment has been described as “one of the most famous and delightful experiments in modern psychology” (Brooks, 2011; Mischel, 2014). The concept of delay of gratification and related concepts (e.g., self‐regulation, willpower, ego strength, conscientiousness) are among the most widely studied in the social sciences (Duckworth, 2011). But questions have been raised about the concept, its measurement, and its social policy implications. Does the marshmallow test measure the ability to delay gratification or might it measure something else, such as trust, the ability to think about and have confidence in the future, or perhaps even intelligence (Bourne, 2014; Konnikova, 2013)? Are all the seemingly related concepts really the same or are they different? Is it really self‐control and do early measures of it really have predictive power? Recent research addressing these issues suggests the following conclusions: 1) The various self‐control concepts and related measure are associated with one another but are not identical (Duckworth & Kern, 2011). 2) The concept of self‐control is distinct from that of intelligence or socioeconomic status (Duckworth, 2011; Moffitt et al., 2011). 3) Measures of self‐control, including the marshmallow task, have significant predictive power in terms of later functioning in areas such as school success, occupational success, physical and mental health, and lack of criminal convictions (Duckworth & Carlson, in press; Duckworth, Tsukayama, & Kirby, 2013; Moffitt et al., 2011). But what of the social policy implications? Is self‐control a fixed personality characteristic, either by genes or by the earliest years of the environment (or the interaction between the two), or can it be modified by early intervention programs, to the benefit of individuals and society? According to one recent review, there is evidence that school‐based interventions, targeting both individual cognitive strategies and the school culture, provide proof that self‐regulation can be cultivated (Duckworth & Carlson, in press). Delay ability in childhood also predicts health‐related outcomes. When researchers related delay ability at age 4 to body mass index measured at age 11, they found that children who were poor at delaying gratification were more likely to become overweight (Schlam et al., 2013; Seeyave et al., 2009). This result is consistent with research showing that the ability to control impulses and emotions is relatively stable across the life span and contributes to important life outcomes such as academic performance, alcohol and drug abuse, overeating, and monetary spending (Gailliot, Mead, & Baumeister, 2008). Personality and the Brain Delay of Gratification As you've just seen, individual differences in the ability to delay gratification are detectable early in childhood and often persist into the later years of life. A challenge for research on personality and the brain is to identify the neural bases of these differences among individuals. Note that we said neural “bases,” plural. At a psychological level of analysis, there is not one, but two, components to delay of gratification: (1) the impulsive desire to attain a reward and (2) cognitive strategies that people use to avoid acting on that impulse. One should expect, then, that a biological analysis will identify at least two areas of the brain that might contribute to individual differences in delay ability: a brain system underlying impulsive reactions to rewards and another brain system that underlies the ability to devise cognitive strategies. Researchers who have searched for these brain regions have done so in a study that was conducted with an interesting group of participants: adults who, when they were children, participated in Mischel's delay of gratification experiments (Casey et al., 2011). By studying this population, the researchers could relate childhood delay of gratification abilities to adulthood brain activity. They expected to find links from childhood to adulthood because self‐control abilities are relatively consistent across the life course. Two types of participants were identified: people who were either (1) consistently good or (2) consistently poor at delaying gratification in childhood. These people, as adults, were asked to attempt a task that required them to control their impulses. In the task, called a go/no‐go task, the participants have to either press a button (go) or inhibit their tendency to press the button (no go) in response to different stimuli that are shown rapidly on a video screen. The ability to control the urge to press the button (when pressing it is inappropriate) taps some of the same mental control abilities that are needed to delay gratification in the original Mischel research paradigm. Participants performed the go/no‐go task while in a brain scanner. The researchers thus could search for variations in the brain that corresponded to variations in delay of gratification ability. As expected, they found such variations in not one but two regions of the brain: – One region was in the frontal lobes. The brain's frontal lobes are a higher‐level brain region critical to the human ability to make plans and to control the flow of one's own actions, especially when choosing between two courses of action. Delay ability was found to be positively related to activity within the frontal lobes. People who (as children) were better at self‐control displayed (as adults) more activity in this brain region. – The other was a brain structure known as the striatum, which is found in a lower region of the brain. The striatum is known to be involved in the processing of information about rewards. Delay ability related negatively to activation in this region. People who had less delay of gratification ability in childhood displayed more brain activation in this reward‐processing area of the brain as adults. The researchers suggest that this high level of activation in the striatum may overwhelm the frontal lobes' ability to control behavior (Casey et al., 2011). The research, then, provides insight into two neural bases of individual differences in the ability to delay gratification. In addition, there is an action component to this research in terms of school‐based intervention programs to improve self‐control mechanisms in young children (Duckworth & Carlson, in press). Summary of the Social‐Cognitive View of Growth and Development In addition to the importance of direct experience, social‐cognitive theory emphasizes the importance of models and observational learning in personality development. Individuals acquire emotional responses and behaviors through observing the behaviors and emotional responses of models (i.e., the processes of observational learning and vicarious conditioning). Whether acquired behaviors are performed similarly depends on directly experienced consequences and the observed consequences to models. By experiencing direct external consequences, individuals learn to expect rewards and punishments for specific behaviors in specific contexts. Through vicarious experiencing of consequences to others, individuals acquire emotional reactions and learn expectancies without going through the often painful step of experiencing consequences directly. Thus, through direct experience and observation, through direct experiencing of rewards and punishments, and through vicarious conditioning, individuals acquire such important personality characteristics as competencies, expectancies, goals/standards, and self‐efficacy beliefs. In addition, through such processes, individuals acquire self‐regulatory capacities. Thus, through the development of cognitive competencies and standards, people are able to anticipate the future and reward or punish themselves for relative progress in meeting chosen goals. The latter self‐produced consequences are of particular significance in maintaining behavior over extended periods of time in the absence of external reinforcers. It is important to recognize that social‐cognitive theory is opposed to views that emphasize fixed stages of development and broad personality types. According to Bandura and Mischel, people develop skills and competencies in particular areas. Rather than developing consciences or healthy egos, they develop competencies and motivational guides for action that are attuned to specific contexts. Such a view emphasizes the ability of people to discriminate among situations and to regulate behavior flexibly according to internal goals and the demands of the situation. MAJOR CONCEPTS A cognitive–affective processing system Acquisition Behavioral signatures Cognitive–affective processing system (CAPS) Competencies Context specificity Delay of gratification Evaluative standards Expectancies Goals Microanalytic research Observational learning Perceived self‐efficacy Performance Reciprocal determinism Self‐evaluative reactions Self‐regulation Vicarious conditioning REVIEW Social‐cognitive theory centers its analyses of personality on uniquely human cognitive capacities. Thanks to their ability to think about themselves, their past, and their future, individuals are seen to have the capacity to influence their own experiences and development. Since these thinking processes develop through interaction with the social environment, they are called social‐cognitive. Two theorists who have made primary contributions to the development of the social‐cognitive approach are Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel. The personality structures emphasized in social‐cognitive theory are competencies and skills, expectancies and beliefs, behavioral standards, and personal goals. These four personality variables refer to four distinct classes of cognition; they thus can be seen as distinct subsystems within the overall system of personality. Any given person may have different skills, beliefs, standards, and goals in different situations. Thus, behavior naturally varies across situations in a meaningful manner that reflects the individual's personality characteristics. Social‐cognitive theory addresses personality processes in two primary ways. First, the principle of reciprocal determinism captures the back‐and‐forth influences between personality and the environment. Second, personality is construed as a cognitive–affective processing system. Much research on personality processes from a social‐cognitive perspective has explored the phenomena of observational learning, self‐regulation, and self‐control. The social‐cognitive theory analysis of observational learning emphasizes that people's knowledge and skills primarily are acquired by observing others. Observational learning processes include the learning of emotional reactions through observation of models or “vicarious conditioning”. An important distinction is made between acquiring patterns of behavior in the absence of rewards and performing those behaviors. The social‐cognitive theory analysis of motivation emphasizes the role of people's thoughts about themselves. Self‐efficacy judgments, or perceptions of one's capability to execute behaviors, are key to motivation; self‐efficacy beliefs influence people's selection of goals, effort and persistence toward achieving the goal, emotions prior to and during task performance, and success in coping with stress and negative events. In addition, much work examines processes of goal setting and the role that people's evaluations of their own actions play in goal‐directed motivation. Research on the development of cognitive and behavioral competencies associated with delay in gratification illustrates the social‐cognitive approach to questions of both self‐control and personality development. Standards for self‐control are learned through the observation of models and through reinforcement. The ability to delay gratification involves the development of cognitive competencies, especially involving the control of attention; people who distract themselves from frustrating situations are better able to control their negative emotions and impulses. Research also indicates that individual differences in the capacity to delay gratification are remarkably stable across the course of development.

CHAPTER 13

13 Social‐Cognitive Theory: Applications, Related Theoretical Conceptions, and Contemporary Developments Questions to be Addressed in this Chapter Cognitive Components of Personality: Beliefs, Goals, and Evaluative Standards Contemporary Developments in Personality Theory: The KAPA Model Clinical Applications Stress, Coping, and Cognitive Therapy The Case of Jim Critical Evaluation Major Concepts Review Chapter Focus A college senior working on medical school applications was filled with anxiety. How could he cope with the possibility of not getting accepted anywhere? His family is counting on him to be a doctor. His friends would think he was a big braggart if he was rejected after years of boasting about his professional plans. These thoughts distracted him so much that his work progressed slowly, he submitted some applications late, and he thereby worsened his chances of admission. The case is not uncommon. People's success in life depends, in part, on what they think about themselves. When facing a challenge, people often think about not only the task at hand (“what should I include in this application?”) but also their hopes, fears, and obligations to others (“what if I don't get in?!”). Depending on how people think about themselves, their thoughts can distract them from the task at hand, create anxiety, and thus undermine performance. Basic research in social‐cognitive theory has tried to understand the impact of beliefs, goals, and standards on people's emotions and behavior, including negative emotions that undermine performance. In clinical applications, psychologists have aimed to alter self‐defeating negative beliefs. These challenges are the focus of this chapter. Questions to be Addressed in this Chapter How do knowledge structures—especially cognitive “schemas”—contribute to personality functioning and help to explain individual differences? How do personal goals and standards of self‐evaluation differ from one person to another, and how do these differences relate to motivation and emotional life? What is the role of self‐efficacy beliefs and other self‐referent thinking processes in psychological disorders and therapeutic change? What are some scientific challenges that were not addressed in the original formulations of social‐cognitive theory and how have they been addressed by contemporary developments in personality theory? In Chapter 12, you learned that social‐cognitive theory explains personality in terms of basic thinking—or cognitive—capacities. The main theorists, Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel, try to understand how people's cognitive capacities develop as people interact with the social world. As you will recall, three social‐cognitive personality variables were as follows: People's beliefs about the self and the world Their personal aims or goals The evaluative standards that people use to judge the goodness or worth of their own actions and those of others Social‐cognitive theory advanced a straightforward idea: Beliefs, goals, and standards—as well as competencies for performing behaviors—are cognitive variables that help to explain the uniqueness and coherence of individuals' personalities. Consider an example close at hand. Why are you spending a lot of time these days reading textbooks, going to classes, and studying for exams, when you could just be hanging out with friends, listening to music, and snacking? It probably is because you (1) believe you need to study to excel at school and believe you have the ability to do so, (2) have the goal of doing well in courses and graduating, and (3) know you would evaluate yourself negatively (i.e., you'd feel bad about yourself) if you spent your whole day just hanging out, snacking; that behavior would fall below your standards for evaluating yourself. Although your personality style might be described by a personality trait term such as “conscientious” (Chapter 8), the explanation of your behavior can be found in social‐cognitive variables: your (1) beliefs, (2) goals, and (3) standards for self‐evaluations. In this chapter, we review research programs on each of these three social‐cognitive components of personality. Some of the research was spearheaded by Bandura or Mischel, the primary social‐cognitive theorists you have learned about in Chapter 12, whereas others were initiated by other personality scientists; many psychologists contribute to the social‐cognitive approach to personality. Finally, at the end of the chapter, we will review consider a contemporary development in personality theory that addresses some limitations in the original 20th‐century formulation of social‐cognitive theory. Cognitive Components of Personality: Beliefs, Goals, and Evaluative Standards Beliefs About The Self And Self‐Schemas As noted in our opening Chapter Focus, it is human nature to think about oneself. Your day may be filled with external challenges—at school, at work, or with family and friends. Yet you inevitably spend much time reflecting on your internal mental life: your feelings, your goals, and the personality characteristics you possess. People contemplate not only the challenges they face but also their own thoughts and feelings as they face those challenges. And you have been doing this for years. Over the course of time, people's self‐reflections usually coalesce into a stable self‐concept: a set of beliefs about one's primary personal qualities and aspirations (Dweck, 2017; Harter, 2012). Once formed, this self‐concept is influential. Beliefs about the self‐affect emotions, motivation, and even the content of the ideas that “pop into mind” as we go about our day (Klinger, Marchetti, & Koster, in press). Historically, psychology's attention to self‐concept has been inconsistent. With some exceptions (see Chapter 5), psychologists devoted relatively little attention to self‐concept during the first three‐fourths of the 20th century. The intellectual scene shifted rapidly only after the century's three‐quarter mark, with a turning point being the year 1977. It witnessed the publication of seminal papers in which self‐concept figured prominently, including Bandura's (1977) initial statement of self‐efficacy theory (see Chapter 12), research documenting that self‐relevant information is more memorable than other types of information (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977), and novel analyses of “self‐schemas,” reviewed immediately below. A Google Scholar search (conducted by your Author) indicates the magnitude of this shift in the field. In the two decades from 1980 to 2000, the number of published papers whose titles contained both the words “self” and “psychology” was 2270. In the two decades from 1930 to 1950, the number of such papers was only 28. Schemas and Self‐Schemas The idea that the mind contains schemas has a long history. The 18th‐century German philosopher Immanuel Kant recognized that people make sense out of new experiences by interpreting events in terms of preexisting ideas that he called schemas (Watson, 1963). Schemas are knowledge structures; specifically, they are highly developed, informationally elaborate structures of knowledge that people use to make sense out of what otherwise might be a confusing jumble of stimuli. Here is an example. Suppose you hear a new song on the radio. In terms of sheer physical stimuli reaching your ears, it might seem chaotic: There's some banging on a drum, some noises from a synthesizer, a few guitar chords, somebody singing something, somebody else singing something else—and all at the same time! Yet, of course, it isn't chaotic. To you, it is a structured, meaningful, memorable piece of music. It sounds this way because you have acquired mental schemas for song structures that guide your interpretation of the sounds. The role of schemas becomes clear if you hear music of a type that is unfamiliar to you (e.g., music from an unfamiliar culture or free jazz that abandons traditional rhythms and melodic structures). It might sound chaotic to you—even though it surely sounds structured and orderly to its composer. This is because you lack the musical schemas that are necessary to make sense of the sounds. Schemas are not just lists of facts stored in memory but, instead, are organized networks of knowledge (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Smith, 1998). These networks may be of such complexity that it is impossible to put all your knowledge into words. For example, you have a schema for music but if somebody asks even a simple question such as “What does a guitar sound like?,” it's hard to say anything other than “um, like a guitar”. Hazel Markus (1977) recognized that many of our most important schemas concern ourselves. Self‐schemas are highly developed, elaborate knowledge structures that contain knowledge of one's own personal qualities. Once formed, self‐schemas affect our thinking; they draw attention to schema‐relevant information and influence the way we interpret situations. Here is an example. Suppose you have a “shy around strangers” self‐schema, that is, a schema that represents your belief that you are shy around people who have not previously met. The schema may (a) draw your attention to related information (e.g., if somebody invites you over for a party, you will notice if they mention a lot of other invitees who you do not know) and (b) shape your thinking during the event (once you get to the party, you might start worrying that you are acting too shy). Your personality dynamics—your thoughts and feelings—are influenced by your self‐schema. Different people—with their different interpersonal, social, and cultural life experiences—inevitably develop different self‐schemas, that is, schemas with different content. For example, one person might have an independence/dependence self‐schema; in other words, she might commonly think of herself as an independent person, might possess a lot of knowledge about this personality characteristic of hers, and might interpret situations according to their relevance to independence. Another person might possess a schema organized around the concept of guilt/innocence and might use this schema to interpret many situations, even though a guilt/innocence schema might not even be present in most other persons. Self‐schemas, then, may account for the relatively unique ways in which idiosyncratic individuals think about the world around them. Self‐Schemas and Reaction‐Time Methods Importantly, Markus (1977) did not merely analyze self‐schemas theoretically. She also employed a measurement tool for studying them in research: reaction‐time measures. In reaction‐time measures, researchers record not only the content of people's responses to questions but also how long they take to respond. Reaction times are relevant to self‐schemas for the following reason. If self‐schemas guide information processing, then people who possess a self‐schema should think more quickly; self‐schemas should lower reaction times. Specifically, they should lower reaction times in the domain of life in which people are “schematic” (i.e., possess a self‐schema). Here's an example. Suppose you meet two people. One does volunteer community service for hours every week. The other volunteers for something only once a year. If you ask both people, “are you helpful to others,” they may both say yes. From these two responses – “yes” and “yes”—you could not tell one person from the other. But now imagine that you had timed their responses to your question. The person who volunteers only once a year may have paused for a moment, thought about their activities, and eventually concluded that “yes, I'm helpful.” But the other person may have said “yes” immediately. Thanks to their frequent volunteer service, they have developed a self‐schema for the characteristic “helpfulness”. This knowledge structure is activated by the content of the question and triggers an immediate “yes” response. Reaction times thus reveal cognitive schemas. This is exactly the sort of result found by Markus (1977). In one study, she identified three groups of people: individuals who said that (1) they are highly independent and independence is important to them; (2) they are highly dependent on others and dependence is important to them; and (3) the personal qualities of independence and dependence are not important to them. Groups 1 and 2 were expected to possess a self‐schema regarding (in)dependence. Participants then were asked to rate whether a series of adjectives that are semantically related to independence/dependence (e.g., individualistic, adventurous, dependable, conforming) were descriptive of themselves. As predicted, participants who possessed a schema made schema‐consistent judgments more quickly. People may develop self‐schemas about any domain of life. You may be schematic, for example, about your intelligence, or sense of humor, or physical appearance. Some schemas are relatively idiosyncratic; in other words, people may have beliefs about themselves that are unique. Others are widely shared. For example, one research team studied the role of sexual self‐schemas, in order to test the hypothesis that women with differing sexual self‐schemas would process interpersonal information differently and behave differently in their sexual and romantic relationships (Andersen & Cyranowski, 1994). In this research, women were asked to rate themselves on a list of 50 adjectives, 26 of which were used to form a Sexual Self‐Schema Scale (e.g., uninhibited, loving, romantic, passionate, direct). They also were asked to respond to measures that asked about sexual experiences and romantic involvement. Clear evidence was found that women with high scores on the Sexual Self‐Schema Scale, particularly those with positive sexual self‐schemas, were more sexually active, experienced greater sexual arousal and sexual pleasure, and were more able to be involved in romantic love relationships relative to women with low scores on the scale. “Co‐schematics,” that is, women who had both positive schemas organized around their ability to experience sexual passion and negative schemas involving sexual conservatism or embarrassment, were found to experience high levels of involvement with sexual partners, yet also to experience relatively high levels of sexual anxiety (Cyranowski & Andersen, 1998). These experiences, in turn, could further influence views about the self, creating a self‐confirming bias in which schemas contribute to experiences that, in turn, confirm the original schemas. Any given individual does not possess merely one self‐schema. Instead, people tend to live complex lives in which they develop a number of different views of themselves. For example, it may not be the case that you are either a hard‐working student, or a loyal friend, or a good dancer at parties, or an anxious test‐taker. Instead, you well could be all four of these things; that is, you may possess self‐schemas concerning all four of these aspects of self. The different self‐schemas would tend to come to mind in different settings. Different situational cues may cause different self‐schemas to enter working memory and, thus, to be part of the working self‐concept (Markus & Wurf, 1987), that is, the subset of self‐concept that is in working memory at any given time. Self‐concept thus is dynamic; the information about the self that is in consciousness, and guides behavior, at any given time, changes dynamically as people interact with the ever‐changing events of the social world (Figure 13.1). FIGURE 13.1 Markus and Wurf's (1987) model of the dynamic self‐concept. In the model, people possess a large number of mental representations involving the self (“Self‐Concept”). A subset of them is in working memory, and thus constitutes the “Working” self, at any given time. Note an implication of this research on self‐schemas: The self is not a single, unitary element of the mind. Instead, people commonly possess multiple self‐schemas that are each an aspect of their self‐concept. The different self‐schemas may be related to one another; for example, a person who thinks they are “hard working,” “anxiety prone,” and “fun at parties” may understand that partying is a way of relieving anxiety experienced at work. People tend to possess a “family of selves” (Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987)—that is, a collection of self‐views that may be as diverse as are different members of the same family, yet that may share some family resemblances. According to this view, you are many things, in many places, with many people. Thus, you have many contextualized selves, each with a set of features. The features of these contextualized selves, this family of selves, will overlap in some ways and be distinctive in others. Each of us, then, has a family of selves, the contents and organization of which are unique. Within this family of selves there may be a prototypic self, a self‐concept in relation to which we say “This is what I am really like.” And within this family of selves there may be fuzzy selves, or parts of us that we are not sure how they fit in relation to the other selves. Self‐Based Motives and Motivated Information Processing Self‐schemas do not merely provide information that is used in thinking, in the way that Wikipedia provides information used to answer a trivia question. Self‐schemas also motivate information processing. The way you think—the information you seek out; the conclusions you draw—may reflect your views of yourself and your desire to maintain your self‐image (Kwan, John, Kenny, Bond, & Robins, 2004; Leary, 2007). Researchers have identified two self‐based motives that influence thinking: self‐enhancement and self‐verification (Swann, 2012; Swann & Bosson, 2008). Self‐enhancement is familiar to you intuitively. You know that if somebody gets a bad exam grade, they may conclude that the exam was unfair, and if they get a good grade that will discuss their inherent brilliance. Much research is consistent with such intuitions; people often are biased to maintain a positive view of themselves (Tesser, Pilkington, & McIntosh, 1989). These biases can be explained by positing a self‐enhancement motive: a motive to maintain a positive self‐image. This motive causes people to overestimate their positive attributes (Dunning, Heath, & Suls, 2004) and to enhance self‐image by selectively comparing themselves to people who are faring less well (Wood, 1989). The second motive is less intuitive, yet may be equally influential. People also may be motivated to experience themselves as consistent and predictable—as being basically the same person from one day to the next. The psychologist William Swann explains this by positing a self‐verification motive (Swann, 2012; Swann & Bosson, 2008; Swann, Rentfrow, & Guinn, 2003), which is a motive to obtain information that confirms one's own self‐concept. A self‐identified introvert, for example, may start a discussion about how she stayed at home reading a book all weekend. The discussion is a social setting that verifies her sense of self. As the example suggests, people will even seek to verify negative qualities. People who are depressed and have negative self‐schemes may seek out self‐verifying information. If they obtain it, the information not only maintains their negative self‐image; it may also serve to maintain their depression (Giesler, Josephs, & Swann, 1996). More generally, people gravitate toward relationships with others who see them as they see themselves. People with positive (negative) self‐concepts are more committed to spouses who think highly of them positively (negatively; De La Ronde & Swann, 1998; Swann, De La Ronde, & Hixon, 1994). Learning Versus Performance Goals Self‐schemas, discussed above, concern people's beliefs: what they believe are their most significant personal qualities. Another element of personality important to social‐cognitive approaches is people's goals (see Chapter 12). Goals, which are mental representations of the aim of an action or set of actions, are central to human motivation. People's goal can differ in a variety of ways. One is the people may have differ goal levels; for example, a friend of yours might have the goal of earning a B in a psychology class whereas you might be aiming for an A (a higher level goal). In addition, there are different types of goals. Different people, in other words, may think differently about the aim, or purpose, or any given activity. Influential theory and research on social‐cognitive processes and different types of goals comes from the psychologist Carol Dweck, who distinguished between “learning” and “performance” goals.

In the theory of goals and motivation developed by Dweck and her colleagues (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Grant & Dweck, 1999; Olson & Dweck, 2008), learning goals and performance goals are different ways of thinking about what you are trying to accomplish on an activity. The difference can be understood through a simple example. Suppose that you are working on a group project and are about to present your part of the project to others in the group who will discuss its strong and weak points. Right before the presentation, you might focus your attention on how their feedback will provide information that can help you to improve your work. If so, you have a learning goal: You are striving to learn from others, in order to increase your ability and achievement. Alternatively, you might focus on the personal impression you'll make on the other people; you might try to “look smart” and to avoid doing anything that will make you look stupid. If so, you would have a performance goal: the aim of “putting on a good performance” for others who will be evaluating your abilities. Is all the world a stage? Research by Carol Dweck indicates that, rather than focusing exclusively on learning, some students become concerned that they are being observed and evaluated by others, and try to “put on a good performance.” People with learning versus performance goals experience activities differently, particularly if they are not confident in their abilities. In one study (Elliott & Dweck, 1988), students were given information designed to induce either learning goals (students were told that the task would sharpen their mental skills) or performance goals (students were told their performance would be evaluated by experts) on a problem‐solving task. Students' beliefs in their ability on the task were also manipulated through provision of bogus feedback on a prior activity. The researchers measured task performance and also asked students to think out loud while they attempted the task; the think‐aloud process provided a record of the thoughts running through their minds during task performance. The research yielded two key results: —Students with performance goals and low beliefs in their ability performed poorly. The measure of task performance indicated that they were less likely than others to devise useful strategies for solving the task. —Students with performance goals and low beliefs in their ability also become distracted from the task itself. The think‐aloud measure indicated that, unlike students with learning goals, those with performance goals became tense, anxious, and worried about why they weren't doing better on the task. (“My stomach hurts” [Elliott & Dweck, 1988, p. 10], one of them said.) The findings show that performance goals can create a pattern of thought and emotion that we commonly call “test anxiety”. As you know, some people become highly anxious when taking a test and, as a result, perform more poorly than they would have if they had remained calm. Dweck's social‐cognitive approach identifies a type of thinking that is an underlying cause of this anxiety. Causes of Learning versus Performance Goals: Implicit Theories Why do some people adopt learning goals on tasks, whereas others adopt performance goals? A primary factor is that different people hold different implicit theories about intelligence. Different implicit theories prompt people to adopt different types of goals (Dweck, 2012). Implicit theories are ideas that guide our thinking, but that we may not usually state in words; we possess the ideas implicitly, even if we do not state them explicitly. Dweck and colleagues are particularly interested in one aspect of people's implicit theories about intelligence: whether intelligence is fixed or changeable (e.g., Dweck, 1991, 1999; Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995). People who hold an entity theory of intelligence believe that intelligence levels are fixed. According to another set of beliefs, known as an incremental theory, intelligence is acquired gradually and naturally changes over time. Differences in implicit theories have implications for the goals people set and their responses to failure (Dweck & Leggett, 1988). Children with an entity view of intelligence tend to set performance goals; if one thinks that intelligence is a fixed entity, then it is only natural to interpret activities as a test of one's intelligence—that is, as a “performance” in which one's intelligence is evaluated. Conversely, children with an incremental view of intelligence tend to set learning goals. If intelligence can be increased, then, it is natural to set the learning goal of acquiring experiences that increase one's intelligence. Thus, different implicit theories lead people to set different goals that, in turn, have different implications for emotion and motivation. This theoretical analysis has practical implications. If one could change people's implicit theories—turning entity theorists into incremental theorists—one should be able to reduce their test anxiety and boost their performance. With this goal in mind, Blackwell, Trzesniewski, and Dweck (2007) enrolled 7th‐graders in an educational intervention designed to induce an incremental theory of intelligence: Students learned that the human brain changes when people study, growing new connections among neurons that increase a person's mental abilities. A separate group of students did not receive this instruction. The academic performance of both groups was monitored during an academic year. By the end of the year, students who had been exposed to the intervention began to outperform the other students. The findings, then, suggest that an intervention can change this social‐cognitive personality structure, implicit theories, and that the change can have beneficial effects. Dweck's analysis of implicit theories applies to domains beyond theories of intelligence. People also differ in theories about emotions. Some believe emotions to be malleable and controllable (“Everyone can learn to control their emotions”), whereas other see emotions as fixed and uncontrollable (“No matter how hard they try, people can't really change the emotions that they have”). Research conducted with students making the transition from high school to college shows that people with these different theories have substantially different outcomes. Students with incremental (malleable) beliefs are better able to regulate their emotions and receive more social support from new friends they meet at college. By the end of the freshman year, those with incremental beliefs were found to have more positive moods and generally better levels of adjustment than those with entity beliefs (Tamir, John, Srivastava, & Gross, 2007). In conclusion, it should be noted that Dweck (2008) sees these beliefs and implicit theories as central to personality functioning and as potential areas of therapeutic change. Personality and the Brain Goals As you've seen, goals are distinct psychological variables in the social‐cognitives approach to personality. Are they also distinct biologically? In other words, might there be unique activity in the brain when people think about goals and standards for evaluating performance? Recent advances in the study of personality and the brain indicate that the answer is yes. Before turning to these advances, note that a key word in the paragraph above is “distinctive.” There is no question that when people set goals and contemplate standards of evaluation, they do so using their brains. The question is whether these thoughts are underpinned by regions of the brain that differ from those that are active when people think about other types of cognitive content. A research team in Europe has investigated neural systems that underlie people's ability to formulate personal goals (D'Argembeau et al., 2009). To determine whether goal‐related thinking activates unique neural systems, the researchers asked participants to imagine future outcomes that either were or were not personal goals for them. (For example, if you had the goal of becoming a doctor and had no particular interest in ever going deep‐sea fishing, those future outcomes respectively would, and would not, represent personal goals.) Participants were in a brain scanner while imagining these two types of outcomes. The brain‐imaging results revealed two brain regions that were more active when people thought about personal goals than about future activities that were not goals for them: the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). These regions are significant for the following reasons. —The MPFC is needed to determine the self‐relevance of events. Many everyday occurrences (a passing car; a randomly overhead conversation) are irrelevant to your well‐being, but some (a passing car containing a friend you were looking for; a conversation about someone you're hoping to get to know better) are highly relevant to you. The MPFC is active in detecting and processing information about the self‐relevant events. —The PCC has been shown to be active during autobiographical memory, that is, memory of events that one has experienced in the past. PCC activation during the personal goals task, then, suggests that activity in the brain relates here‐and‐now goals to memories of past events. (Using our example above, if you contemplated your goal of becoming a doctor, the goal‐related thinking would, thanks to the PCC, activate autobiographical memories, such as discussions you've had with friends and family about becoming a physician.) This brain research, then, has psychological implications. It reminds us that goals are psychologically rich mental contents that combine the detection of personally relevant occurrences in the environment with information stored in your “library” of autobiographical memories.

Standards of Evaluation In Chapter 12, you learned that another personality variable important to social‐cognitive theory is self‐evaluative standards, which are criteria people use to evaluate the goodness or worth of themselves and their actions. Standards are related to, yet differ from, goals (Boldero & Francis, 2002; Cervone, 2004). Goals are aims one hopes to achieve in the future. Standards are criteria used to evaluate events in the present. For example, if you are watching an ice skating performance, you might evaluate the performance as good or bad according to standards you have used for judging the performance of skaters. You might have these standards whether or not you, personally, have the goal of being a figure skater. Goals and standards, then, are psychologically distinct mechanisms. Much work in personality psychology indicates that people regulate their behavior by evaluating whether their actions are consistent with internalized standards for performance (e.g., Baumeister & Vohs, 2004; Carver, Scheier, & Fulford, 2008; Cervone, Shadel, Smith, & Fiori, 2006). Our review of Dweck's work, above, showed that it is valuable to distinguish among qualitatively different types of goals. Similarly, it is valuable to distinguish among qualitatively different types of evaluative standards (Dweck, Higgins, & Grant‐Pillow, 2003). An exceptionally fruitful line of theory and research by the psychologist Tory Higgins (2006, 2012, 2014; Higgins & Scholer, 2008) has expanded the scope of social‐cognitive analyses of personality by showing how different types of evaluative standards relate to different types of emotional experiences and motivation. Self‐Standards, Self‐Discrepancies, Emotion, and Motivation The psychological phenomenon of interest to Higgins can be illustrated with an example. Suppose two people are reading in a college library some night late in the semester, both are unhappy with how they have been doing in a course, and both are behind in course readings as the semester draws to a close. And imagine they take a break from their work to discuss how they're doing. “I'm really anxious about this class,” one person says tensely. “I wanted an A, but I don't even think I can get a B.” “I'm not anxious” says the other, dejectedly. “I'm really depressed about this class. I wanted an A, but I don't even think I can get a B.” What's going on here? How can one explain why the two people have different emotional reactions to the same event? Why is one vulnerable to becoming anxious, the other to becoming depressed? Higgins suggests it is because they are evaluating the event with different types of standards. Although they both “want” the same thing, an A, the subjective nature of that standard of performance differs from one person to the other. The critical distinction is the difference between standards that represent “ideals” versus “oughts”. Some evaluative standards represent achievement that people ideally would like to reach. They represent types of behavior that one values positively. Higgins calls these ideal standards, or aspects of the “ideal self.” (In this way, Higgins's analysis is similar to that of Rogers, Chapter 5.) Alternatively, some evaluative standards represent standards of achievement that people feel they should or ought to achieve. The standards represent duties or responsibilities. These are termed ought standards, or elements of the “ought self”. Higgins's analysis is important to the study of personality and individual differences because different individuals may evaluate the same type of behavior using different standards. Recent work demonstrates this point with a behavior of importance to health: smoking. People who are similar in that they all want to quit nonetheless differ in their evaluative standards regarding quitting. Some wish to quit primarily because they ideally would like to be healthier; smoking for them violates an ideal standard. Others primarily feel a sense of responsibility to others to quit smoking (e.g., to avoid bothering others with cigarette smoke); smoking for them violates an ought standard (Shadel & Cervone, 2006). A key insight of Higgins's is that different types of standards, ought versus ideal, trigger different types of negative emotions (Higgins, 1987, 1996). There are two steps to Higgins's reasoning: (1) People experience negative emotions when they detect a discrepancy between how things really are going for them—or their “actual self”—and a personal standard. These self‐discrepancies are cognitive mechanisms that contribute to emotional experience. (2) Discrepancies with different (ideal versus ought) standards trigger different emotions. Discrepancies between the actual and ideal self cause people to feel sad or dejected; failing to meet one's ideal standards is a loss of positive outcomes that brings on sadness. Discrepancies between the actual and ought self cause agitation and anxiety; the possibility of not achieving one's obligations is a potential negative outcome that is threatening. To test these ideas, Higgins, Bond, Klein, and Strauman (1986) first assessed individual differences in self‐discrepancies. They identified one group of people who predominantly have actual/ideal discrepancies and a second set who predominantly have actual/ought discrepancies. To do this, Higgins and colleagues employed a simple questionnaire in which people listed attributes they believed they (a) actually possessed, (b) ideally would like to possess, and (c) believed they should, or ought to, possess. In a subsequent experimental session, these people's emotional reactions were assessed as they envisioned themselves experiencing a negative life event. Although all participants envisioned the same event, they experienced different emotions. People whose self‐descriptions featured many actual/ideal discrepancies tended to become sad but not anxious when thinking about the negative outcome. People whose self‐described attributes featured mostly actual/ought discrepancies became anxious but not sad. If you are thinking critically, you might complain that these findings are only correlational; different types of self‐discrepancies are correlated with different emotional reactions. As we discussed in Chapter 2, experimental—rather than merely correlational—research would provide evidence that is more convincing. Recognizing this fact, Higgins and colleagues also studied self‐discrepancies experimentally. They did so by manipulating self‐discrepancies through cognitive priming. People who possessed both actual/ideal and actual/ought self‐discrepancies were randomly assigned to conditions that primed either ideal standards or ought standards. In different experimental conditions, participants were asked to briefly discuss either their personal hopes (to prime the ideal self) or their duties and obligations (to prime the ought self). Priming alternative standards led to different emotional reactions. When ideal self‐discrepancies were primed, participants felt dejected. When ought standards were primed, they felt agitated. Thus, an experimental manipulation of cognition led to changes in emotion. Much subsequent research has yielded evidence consistent with Higgins's core idea that discrepancies with ideal versus ought standards lead to different emotional experiences. This includes clinical research with social phobics and clinically depressed patients, who exhibit predominantly actual/ought and actual/ideal discrepancies, respectively (Strauman, 1989). Higher levels of neuroticism and lower levels of subjective well‐being are experienced by people whose self‐descriptions indicate a discrepancy between how they really think they are and how they judge who they think they ought to be (Pavot, Fujita, & Diener, 1997). The existence of self‐discrepancies has health implications, having been found to decrease the effectiveness of the functioning of our immunological system in fighting disease (Strauman, Lemieux, & Coe, 1993). Clinical researchers have begun to develop therapeutic techniques to reduce discrepancies between the actual and ideal self (Strauman et al., 2001). Higgins (2006, 2014) emphasizes that evaluative standards have implications not only for emotional experience but also for motivation. People who evaluate their actions primarily through ideal standards tend to have a “promotion” approach to their activities. In other words, they are motivated toward promoting well‐being, which they do by focusing on positive outcomes (either attaining positive outcomes or avoiding their loss once they have been attained). A pre‐med student with a promotion focus might dwell on the benefits of a medical career or the importance of not lowering his or her high grade point average. In contrast, a focus on ought standards tends to make one prevention‐focused, that is, focused on preventing the occurrence of (or gaining an absence of) negative outcomes. In our previous example, a prevention‐focused pre‐med student might focus on the possibility of not being admitted to med school and might view good class performance primarily as a way in which one avoids this negative outcome. Different motivational processes come into play when one is prevention versus promotion‐focused (Shah & Higgins, 1997), and people's actions feel more natural to them when their activities fit their primary motivational orientation (Higgins, 2006).

A “General Principles” Approach to Personality Higgins's analysis of cognition, emotion, and individual differences has a theoretical advantage that is a bit subtle, yet highly significant. It concerns the explanation of consistency and variability in behavior as people encounter diverse situations. As we have discussed previously (see especially Chap. 8), some personality psychologists embrace the following two‐step logic: (1) consistencies in behavior reveals an individual's personality, whereas (2) variability in behavior reflect the power of social situations. In this approach, “personality variables” explain what people do on average and “situational factors” variability around the average. As Higgins (1999) recognizes, this thinking yields a very unsatisfying science of persons. It is unsatisfying because entirely different scientific principles—personal factors versus situational influences—are invoked to explain the same type of behavior, exhibited in different circumstances. In contrast, Higgins (1999) provides a general principles approach. A common set of principles, involving personal knowledge and standards for performance, explains both consistency and variability in personality functioning. Personal knowledge is an enduring structure of mind that contributes to behavioral consistency. Different situations activate different aspects of knowledge which, in turn, fosters variability. In this approach, one of personality psychology's “classic” distinctions—(1) consistency and personality effects versus (2) variability and situation effects—becomes a relic (Cervone, Caldwell, & Orom, 2008). Instead of disconnected “person” and “situation” effects, one obtains an integrated account of personal and situational influences, and of the consistency and variability of behavior. Higgins' analysis is closely related to the contemporary development in social‐cognitive theory to which we turn next. Contemporary Developments in Personality Theory: The KAPA Model You have just learned about advances in the study of social cognition and personality that were spearheaded by Hazel Markus, Carol Dweck, and Tory Higgins. Each focused primarily on one or two social‐cognitive variables: self‐schemas (Markus); goals and implicit beliefs (Dweck); and evaluative standards and emotion (Higgins). This type of focus is a primary way that science progresses; investigators analyze specific processes in detail. Yet a larger question remains: Have there been recent developments in the overall social‐cognitive approach, that is, in efforts to comprehensively address the challenges of personality theory from a social‐cognitive perspective? This question raises another: Are any such developments needed? Did 20th‐century social‐cognitive theory possess limitations that would motivate a new development? After outlining some limitations, we review one contemporary development: the Knowledge‐and‐Appraisal Personality Architecture or KAPA model (Cervone, 2004). A caution to the reader: The primary developer of the KAPA model (Cervone, 2004, 2005, 2007, in press) is your textbook author. The upcoming coverage thus may be biased; I might overemphasize the KAPA model's merits and “repress” its limitations. At this point in our journey through personality theory and research, you are in a good position to evaluate the KAPA model yourself. Social‐Cognitive Theory: Three Limitations of 20th‐Century Theory and Research In many respects, 20th‐century social‐cognitive theory was a success. Compelling research findings spurred a novel theoretical perspective that, in turn, yielded valuable applications. Yet one can identify limitations in three areas (1) personality theory, (2) personality assessment, and (3) identifying cross‐situational consistency in personality. Social‐Cognitive Personality Structures and Processes In Chapter 1, you learned that personality theories contain both “structure” and “process” components. Theorists generally are careful to differentiate structure variables from process variables. Freud, for example, distinguished psychoanalytic structures (the id, ego, and superego) from dynamic processes (flows of mental energy). In social‐cognitive theory, the structure/process distinction is less clear. A particular ambiguity is the following. In many cases, a variable (i.e., a theoretical construct in social‐cognitive theory) is used in two different ways: Sometimes the variable refers to an enduring personality structure and other times it refers to a dynamic personality process. Consider the social‐cognitive personality variable “goals”. If someone, for years, someone has had the goal of becoming a professional soccer player, her “goal” is an enduring social‐cognitive structure. If, while playing in a game, she rushes upfield with the goal of scoring but encounters a defender and changes her goal to that of passing to a teammate, but the pass goes awry and she adopts a new goal of defending, her “goals” are rapidly changing processes. In informal discussions, this dual use of the word “goals” is fine. But in a formal scientific theory of personality, it can be confusing. (Imagine the confusion if Freud had sometimes used the term “superego” to refer to an enduring personality structure and other times to refer to rapidly changing psychological processes.) The general point is that when social‐cognitive theorists proposed variables such as “goals” (or “expectancies” and “values,” Mischel, 1973), they did not indicate whether a given variable was a personality processes or a personality structure (or both). They thus did not adequately address the process versus structure components of personality theory. This is one limitation of the 20th‐century social‐cognitive perspective. Social‐Cognitive Personality Assessment A second limitation involves assessment. Recall that social‐cognitive theory views personality as a “system”: a set of interacting cognitive and affective processes (Bandura, 1999; Mischel & Shoda, 1995). This implies that, in assessment, one should assess a system of interacting social‐cognitive variables. Since they are social‐cognitive variables, one might also assess the situations that activate one versus another self‐cognitive variable for any given person. Unfortunately, in 20th‐century social‐cognitive theory, assessment methods did not keep up with theoretical developments. Social‐cognitive theorists did not develop such assessments. They tended to assess one or two variables at a time (e.g., self‐efficacy perceptions; self‐control abilities). Tools to assess a more complex system of social‐cognitive structures and processes were lacking. In retrospect, assessment methods did not keep pace with theoretical developments. From Social‐Cognitive Systems to Personality Consistency The third limitation concerns a topic you read about back in Chapter 8: the cross‐situational consistency of personality. Walter Mischel (1968) addressed this topic in the early days of social‐cognitive theory. As he explained in a critique of the trait approach, although personality trait variables were designed to explain personality consistency (i.e., consistent styles of personality evident across different situations), they encounter two problems. First, people's trait‐related behavior is often inconsistent. A person might, for example, be highly conscientiousness in some situations and much less conscientious in others (Mischel & Peake, 1982). Second, even when behavior is consistent, trait variables cannot explain the consistency. To say that a person consistently behaved conscientiously “because of her conscientiousness” is to go around in conceptual circles. In retrospect, after crafting this critique the social‐cognitive theorists might have done something more: They might have shown how their approach can succeed where trait theory failed. In other words, they might have developed a social‐cognitive explanation of where, and why, people display cross‐situationally consistent personality styles. But this was not accomplished in the 20th‐century social‐cognitive approach. Addressing the Limitations: The KAPA Model The KAPA model (Cervone, 2004) was designed to address these three limitations. Let's first consider its approach to personality structures and processes. Knowledge Structures and Appraisal Processes The KAPA model's central claim is that there are two types of social‐cognitive personality variables: knowledge and appraisals (Cervone, 2004; also see Lazarus, 1991). Knowledge is enduring; it is a social‐cognitive structure. Appraisals shift rapidly over time; they are social‐cognitive processes. We will illustrate the knowledge/appraisal distinction with an example. Consider two types of thoughts you may have about yourself: You may believe you are an “intelligent person” who “has trouble dealing with stress.” You may have thought about yourself this way for years. These two beliefs are unlikely to change any time soon; you will not wake up next week or next month thinking “I'm actually an unintelligent person who has no trouble at all dealing with stress.” When contemplating the end of your academic semester, you might think “I'll do great on my personality final exam!” But a moment later you might realize, “Oh no, with all my other exams, I might not have time to study—and I'll do badly.” Yet another moment later, you might devise a strategy: “I'll spend less time on my boring Sociology class, freeing up time for Personality—and I will get an A!” In the language of 20th‐century social‐cognitive theory, both sets of thoughts, A and B, are self‐referent social cognitions: thoughts about oneself in interaction with the social world. Yet they plainly differ. The “A” cognitions are long‐lasting, stable beliefs. The “B” cognitions are a rapidly changing flow of thought. In the KAPA model, the A's are knowledge structures and the B's are appraisal processes (Cervone, 2004; also see Lazarus, 1991; Smith & Lazarus, 1990). Knowledge refers to enduring mental representations, that is, long‐lasting concepts about oneself, other people, and the world at large. In the study of personality, a particularly important aspect of knowledge is self‐knowledge: enduring mental representations of one's own personal qualities and aspirations. We already covered one type of self‐knowledge structure earlier in this chapter, when discussing self‐schemas. Appraisals are ongoing evaluations of the relation between oneself and the surrounding (or upcoming) environment. The thoughts that run through your head whenever you encounter a challenge—“ugh, I'm not doing as well as I should,” “can I do better?” “how—what should I do next?”—are appraisals. Much research establishes that people's appraisals influence their emotions and behavior (Moors, Ellsworth, Scherer, & Fridja, 2013). Many of the social‐cognitive processes you read about in Chapter 12, such as the flow of thoughts (self‐efficacy perceptions and self‐evaluative reactions) that occur when people receive feedback on challenging tasks, are appraisals. Knowledge and appraisal are systematically related. Knowledge structures influence appraisal processes (Higgins, 1996; Markus & Wurf, 1987). The way people think about an event (their appraisals) is affected by beliefs, plans, and memories they have stored in memory (knowledge). Knowledge influences appraisals particularly strongly when situations are ambiguous and you have to figure out what is going on. “Does that person like me, or not?,” “Should I talk to them more to find out, or not?” When trying to figure out ambiguous circumstances, people draw on knowledge they have stored in memory. Social‐Cognitive Personality Assessment The knowledge/appraisal distinction establishes a goal for personality assessment. In the KAPA model, the main assessment goal is to identify the knowledge structures that are most significant to an individual and the appraisals the person engages in when thinking about the challenges of his or her life. Two assessment principles guide this search (Cervone, Shadel, & Jencius, 2001). Assess Knowledge and Appraisal Contextually. People's thoughts often vary a lot from one situation to another. You may feel confident around your friends but not around strangers. You may know that you are a responsible, reliable parent—and a procrastinator when it comes to studying. KAPA model assessments thus are contextual. Rather than asking what people are like “in general,” KAPA assessments try to identify people's primary thoughts as they encounter the varying contexts (e.g., with friends, with strangers, in the role of parenting, in the role of student) that make up their day. Be Sensitive to Idiosyncrasy. People's beliefs about themselves may vary idiosyncratically. A second principle of KAPA assessments is that one should be sensitive to this idiosyncrasy. Rather than administering brief personality questionnaires with a fixed sets of items, KAPA assessments allow people to describe themselves in their own words (this, too, is illustrated below). In its attention to the potentially unique content of people's belief systems, the KAPA approach is similar to the personal construct assessments pioneered by George Kelly (Chapter 11). Cross‐Situational Coherence in Self‐Appraisals: Self‐Schemas and Self‐Efficacy Appraisals The first two points—the knowledge/appraisal distinction and the KAPA model assessment strategy—lead naturally to the third. The KAPA model aims to understand how knowledge structures produce cross‐situationally consistent patterns of personality functioning. It uses personality assessment strategies that can detect idiosyncratic patterns of personality consistency displayed by unique individuals. The KAPA model's approach can be understood by contrasting it an alternative you saw in Chapter 8. That chapter discussed trait theory and the “person—situation controversy.” The “controversy” concerned research findings: Psychologists drew different conclusions from research results. However, there was a common set of research methods. Almost all studies employed the strategy depicted in the left side of Figure 13.1. Researchers (a) selected a trait construct to study (e.g., conscientiousness); (b) identified a set of situations, and associated response, that were thought to be good measures of the trait (e.g., “if you have a tedious job to do, complete it conscientiously;” “if you have an early morning class, show up for every class meeting on time”); and (c) determine whether a group of people responds consistently across this fixed set of situations. This strategy possesses the problems identified by Mischel (1968): (1) cross‐situational consistency often is low and (2) even if it were high, the approach fails to identify psychological processes that might explain why people respond consistently. In addition, there is a third problem: (3) The research strategy is not sensitive to the idiosyncrasy. If a person displays a meaningful pattern of behavior that is consistent with their own personal qualities but inconsistent with the researcher's trait construct, the research strategy will overlook it. For example, suppose you are in a study of “conscientiousness” that is conducted a week before final exams. If your goal is to excel on the exams, you might (a) spend a lot of time studying, (b) not spend time on distracting activities (e.g., paying bills, doing laundry, etc.), and also (c) try to hang out socially with some people in your classes who seem smart, so you can then be in a study group with them. Your behavior is consistent with your goal. But it is inconsistent with traditional personality traits. The “a” and “b” behaviors are inconsistently conscientious. The “c” behavior, hanging out with friends, would be overlooked in a study of conscientiousness because it is, in trait theory, an example of “extraversion.” The trait strategy may make sense for people in general, but it overlooks the idiosyncrasies of your particular case. The KAPA model suggests an alternative strategy for studying personality consistency. It is depicted in the right side of Figure 13.2. The KAPA strategy rests on two ideas: FIGURE 13.2 These figures contrast two strategies for studying personality consistency. In a trait approach (see Chapters 7‐8), researchers determine the degree to which people are consistent with respect to a fixed personality trait (left side of figure). By contrast, in the social‐cognitive KAPA model (right side of figure), researchers consider the possibility that an individual’s personality consistency may be revealed in a unique set of situations that are particularly relevant to that person’s self‐schemas (i.e., central beliefs about the self). Adapted from Cervone (2004). — Self‐schemas can produce cross‐situational consistency in personality. A given self‐schema might come to mind in any of a variety of situations. If, for example, someone possesses a self‐schema about their being “shy,” the self‐schema might come to mind in settings involving social groups (e.g., meeting new people in one's neighborhood), work (e.g., a job interview), or relationships (e.g., “opening up” to a relationship partner about one's feelings). Since schematic knowledge structures influence appraisal processes, the self‐schema should produce consistent styles of personality across these different settings. — Patterns of cross‐situational consistency may vary idiosyncratically. Any given person might have a unique set of beliefs about themselves. Furthermore, the situations that are important to an individual's day‐to‐day life, and in which those beliefs come into play, may vary idiosyncratically. This suggests that research should search for personality consistency in a manner that is sensitive to idiosyncracy. An example from KAPA model research (Cervone, 2004) will make these somewhat abstract theoretical points more concrete. The individual shown in Figure 13.3 was participating in a study in which, in a first step of personality assessment, people first were asked to write a description of their personal strengths and weaknesses. Personal strengths and weaknesses that people identified as being particularly important to them are the “schematic” personality qualities in this study (cf. Markus, 1977). Two boxes near the bottom of the figure display this particular individual's two primary self‐schemas. As you can see, thought her strongest personal quality is that she can “have a good time naturally.” At the same time, she possessed a negative self‐schema (her personal weakness) in which she thought of herself as being “crabby and bitchy.” FIGURE 13.3 This figure depicts the self‐knowledge and situational beliefs of a participant in a KAPA model study. Her self‐knowledge included the beliefs that she is “crabby and bitchy” yet also “can have a good time naturally.” The arrows pointing up from these two elements of self‐knowledge display the situations that she saw as relevant to one versus the other personal quality. From Cervone (2004). It may immediately cross your mind that these self‐descriptions are hard to reconcile with trait theories of personality. This person is, according to her own descriptions, both high and low on the personality trait of agreeableness. Yet her self‐description is perfectly sensible; lots of people are relaxed and agreeable in some settings and unpleasantly disagreeable in others. The rest of the figure, on the top, displays situations that this person thought were relevant to her two main personality qualities; these situations are identified through a task in which people are asked whether a given personality quality would influence a person's behavior in each of a large number of situations (Cervone, Shadel, & Jencius, 2001). As shown, she saw different personal qualities as being relevant to different situations. Her ability to “have a good time naturally” was, in her view, relevant to social settings that included a lot of strangers. Her crabby/bitchy qualities were relevant to circumstances involving work, driving, or her boyfriend. These are the sort of individualized social‐cognitive “maps” that are central to KAPA model assessments. KAPA model research not only produces individualized portraits like the one in Figure 13.2. It also yields a research finding in the study of personality consistency. People are found to display consistent self‐efficacy appraisals across distinctive sets of situations—specifically, those situations in which their self‐schemas come into play. When self‐schemas are used to predict self‐efficacy appraisals, people are found to have a much higher appraisals of self‐efficacy in those situations in which their positive self‐schemas (their “personal strengths”) come to mind, as compared to situations in which their negative self‐schemas come to mind (Cervone, 1997). This result has been found in a wide variety of studies. Schematic knowledge structures have been found to predict cross‐situational patterns of appraisal in studies of adults contemplating their self‐efficacy for performing everyday behaviors (Cervone, 1997, 2004; Di Blas, 2017; Orom & Cervone, 2009); smokers contemplating situations in which they need to resist smoking urges (Cervone et al., 2007; 2008; Shadel, Cervone, Niaura, & Abrams, 2004); people seeking exercise who think about their ability to engage in different types of recreational activities (Wise, 2007, 2009); adults considering the use of a strategic interpersonal behavior, humor, in different situations (Caldwell, Cervone, & Rubin, 2008); and older adults reflecting on how their strengths and weaknesses might influence their ability to perform challenging everyday tasks (Artistico, et al., 2018). In all these studies, people have higher appraisals of self‐efficacy in situations that are relevant to their positive self‐schemas. One last distinctive feature of the KAPA model is that is can be tested experimentally. Priming procedures (of the sort you saw in Higgins's research on self‐discrepancies) enable researchers to activate one versus another aspect of self‐knowledge. The KAPA model predicts that such priming manipulations should, in turn, influence people's appraisals of self‐efficacy for handling everyday challenges. Priming has been accomplished by asking participants to perform a memory task that is seemingly unrelated to other aspects of the study. On different days, the task presented to participants includes words that are synonymous with either their schematic personal strength of their schematic personal weakness (Cervone et al., 2008). After the priming procedures, people are asked to consider some challenging tasks and appraise their self‐efficacy for success on those tasks. Findings confirm the KAPA model prediction; the priming of positive self‐schemas raises self‐efficacy appraisals in situations relevant to the self‐schema (see Figure 13.4). FIGURE 13.4 The KAPA model predicts that beliefs about oneself (self‐knowledge) that are active in mind will influence appraisals of capabilities for performance, or self‐efficacy appraisals. The graph displays results from a study in which this prediction was tested experimentally. Cognitive priming was used to bring beliefs about either personal strengths or personal weaknesses to mind. Priming personal strengths increased self‐efficacy appraisals – but, as predicted, only in those specific situations in which participants believed that their personal strengths were relevant and helpful. From Cervone, Caldwell, Fiori, Orom, Shadel et al. (2004). In sum, the KAPA model extends the pioneering efforts of Bandura, Mischel, and other prior social‐cognitive investigators. It does so by putting social‐cognitive tools to work on classic problems in the psychology of personality. The result is a theory that combines the nomothetic with the idiographic (cf. Chapter 7). A set of general, nomothetic principles distinguishes personality structures and processes. Individualized, idiographic assessments shed light on personality psychology's fundamental target: the psychological dynamics of the individual. Clinical Applications Thus far in discussing social‐cognitive theory, we primarily have reviewed core theoretical principles and basic research findings. We now turn to a key arena in which this work is applied: the psychological clinic. Clinical applications of cognitive theory have been of enormous significance in the past quarter‐century. Indeed, in many clinical settings and training programs, the cognitive approach has become the most predominant of all theoretical orientations. There is no one theory or technique of cognitive therapy. Instead, there are different approaches, often tailored to specific problems, that share some common assumptions: Cognitions (attributions, beliefs, expectancies, memories concerning the self and others) are viewed as critical in determining feelings and behaviors. Thus, there is an interest in what people think and say to themselves. The cognitions of interest tend to be specific to situations or categories of situations, though the importance of some generalized expectancies and beliefs is recognized. Psychopathology is viewed as arising from distorted, incorrect, maladaptive cognitions concerning the self, others, and events in the world. Different forms of pathology are viewed as resulting from different cognitions or ways of processing information. Faulty, maladaptive cognitions lead to problematic feelings and behaviors, and these in turn lead to further problematic cognitions. Thus, a self‐fulfilling cycle may set in whereby persons act so as to confirm and maintain their distorted beliefs. Cognitive therapy involves a collaborative effort between therapist and patient to determine which distorted, maladaptive cognitions are creating the difficulty and then to replace them with other more realistic, adaptive cognitions. The therapeutic approach tends to be active, structured, and focused on the present. In contrast with other approaches, cognitive approaches do not see the unconscious as important, except insofar as patients may not be aware of their routine, habitual ways of thinking about themselves and life. Further, there is an emphasis on changes in specific problematic cognitions rather than on global personality change. In this section first we will consider the clinical applications that follow directly from social‐cognitive theory, and then we will consider other clinical applications that, while they do not follow directly from the work of Bandura and Mischel, are part of the more general social‐cognitive approach to pathology and change. Psychopathology and Change: Modeling, Self‐Conceptions, and Perceived Self‐Efficacy Why do people experience psychological distress and how can it be reduced? The theories of personality provide different answers to this question. Psychoanalysis tells us that psychological problems experienced in adulthood are symptoms of an underlying psychological pathology that originated in childhood. Humanistic theories claim that interpersonal relationships that are experienced throughout life affect self‐concept and well‐being. Trait theories highlight genetic factors that predispose some people to experience distressful emotions. Social‐cognitive theory provides a different answer. It contains two key parts. First, social‐cognitive theory emphasizes the role of behavioral experience (Bandura, 1969). People may experience environments in which they learn behaviors that are maladaptive or fail to experience settings that teach skills that would help them to cope with life's challenges. A major task for the therapist therefore is to provide clients with new experiences that teach new, adaptive behaviors. Note how this approach differs from a “medical model” of psychological disorder. In a medical model, a therapist might primarily try to identify early‐life experiences or predisposing biological factors that are an underlying cause of a client's symptoms. In the social‐cognitive approach, the therapist instead directly confronts the challenge of modifying the problematic behavior that caused the client to seek professional help. The second distinguishing feature is a focus on cognition, including dysfunctional expectancies and dysfunctional self‐evaluations. If people erroneously expect that negative outcomes will occur to them, these expectations may create the outcomes they hope to avoid. For example, a person who expects that interpersonal closeness with a partner will inevitably bring pain may act in a hostile way toward the partner, thereby harming the relationship. Dysfunctional self‐evaluations include perfectionistic standards for evaluating oneself. As Rogers also recognized in his analysis of the idea self, people who adopt overly‐stringent standards of self‐evaluation—who are happy only if they are the absolutely best player on their team or the best student in class—may doom themselves to repeated disappointed when their impossibly‐high standards are not met. Self‐Efficacy, Anxiety, and Depression The social‐cognitive analysis of psychopathology is multifaceted; a variety of beliefs, actions, and skill deficits can foster psychological distress. Yet the theory does give a central role to perceived self‐efficacy. Let us first consider the role of self‐efficacy perceptions in anxiety. According to social‐cognitive theory, low self‐efficacy for coping with threats directly causes high anxiety arousal. It is not the threatening event per se but the perceived inefficacy in coping with it that is fundamental to anxiety. Research indeed indicates that those who believe they cannot manage threatening events experience relatively greater distress. They also may focus attention on the expected disaster that lies ahead rather than on strategies to cope with a challenge, and may become concerned about their own tendency to panic—a fear‐of‐fear response that can lead to actual panic (Barlow, 1991). Perceived inefficacy also plays a role in depression. A perceived inability to achieve desired outcome creates a sense of loss that is depressing. Furthermore, low self‐efficacy beliefs may contribute to diminished performance, leading to further depression and self‐blame (Kavanagh, 1992). Just such a relationship was found in a study of childhood depression. In this study, perceived social and academic inefficacy was found to contribute to depression directly as well as indirectly through problem behaviors that interfered with future social and academic success (Bandura, Pastorelli, Barbaranelli, & Caprara, 1999). Thus, a self‐defeating cycle was established wherein low self‐efficacy contributed to depression and problem behaviors, which in turn contributed to further perceived inefficacy and depression.

Bandura (1992) raises the interesting point that discrepancies between standards and performance can have varied effects ranging from greater effort to apathy to depression. What determines which effect will occur? According to Bandura, discrepancies between performance and standards lead to high motivation when people believe they have the efficacy to accomplish the goal. Beliefs that the goals are beyond one's capabilities because they are unrealistic will lead to abandoning the goal and perhaps to apathy but not to depression. For example, a person may say “This task is just too hard” and give up, perhaps becoming frustrated and angry but not depressed. Depression occurs when a person feels ineffective in relation to a goal but believes the goal to be reasonable; therefore that person feels he or she must continue to strive to meet the standard. Thus, the effects of a discrepancy between standards and performance on effort and mood depend on self‐efficacy beliefs and on whether the standard is perceived to be reasonable, possible to achieve, and important. The relations between (a) depressed mood and (b) discrepancies between standards and performance is bidirectional. Not only do cognitive discrepancies create depressed emotions; depressed emotions contribute to the existence of these discrepancies. Evidence comes from research that experimentally manipulates people's moods (Cervone, Kopp, Schaumann, & Scott, 1994; Scott & Cervone, 2002) as well as work that compares depressed and nondepressed persons (Tillema, Cervone, & Scott, 2001). The findings indicate that when people are feeling bad, they tend to adopt performance standards that are more perfectionistic. When in a bad mood, routine outcomes seem less satisfactory; as a result, people are satisfied only with superior attainments. These higher standards for performance commonly exceed the level of performance people think they actually can attain (Cervone et al., 1994). Self‐Efficacy and Health One active area of social‐cognitive research has related self‐efficacy beliefs to health. The social‐cognitive theory of health promotion and disease prevention focuses on four structures previously noted: knowledge of health risks and benefits of different health practices; perceived self‐efficacy that one can control one's health habits; outcome expectancies about the expected costs and benefits of different health practices; and the health goals people set for themselves and strategies for realizing them (Bandura, 2004). Not surprisingly, self‐efficacy beliefs are the focus of much health‐related research. The results of this research can be easily summarized: Strong, positive self‐efficacy beliefs are good for your health; conversely, weak and negative self‐efficacy beliefs are bad for your health (Schwarzer, 1992). Self‐efficacy beliefs affect health in two major ways: they affect health‐related behaviors and they impact physiological functioning (Contrada, Leventhal, & O'Leary, 1990; Miller, Shoda, & Hurley, 1996). Self‐efficacy beliefs affect both the likelihood of developing various illnesses and the process of recovery from illness (O'Leary, 1992). Self‐efficacy beliefs have been related to a variety of health‐relevant behaviors (O'Leary, 1992). For example, in the study of safe sex practices, higher self‐efficacy perceptions predict a higher likelihood of safe sexual behavior (Burns & Dillon, 2005). Among individuals recovering from a heart attack, self‐efficacy perceptions that are optimistic, yet also appropriate to the patient's health status, promote healthier exercise patterns (Ewart, 1992). Self‐efficacy beliefs also have been related to specific physiological functions. Evidence indicates that high self‐efficacy beliefs buffer the effects of stress and enhance the functioning of the body's immune (disease‐fighting) system (O'Leary, 1990). In one experiment on perceived self and immune system functioning (Wiedenfeld et al., 1990), participants experiencing snake phobia were tested under three conditions: a baseline involving no exposure to a snake, a perceived self‐efficacy acquisition phase during which they were assisted in gaining a sense of coping efficacy, and a maximal self‐efficacy phase in which they had achieved a complete sense of coping efficacy. During these phases, a small amount of blood was drawn from the subjects and analyzed for the presence of cells known to help regulate the immune system, including helper T cells that play a role in destroying cancerous cells and viruses. Increases in self‐efficacy beliefs were associated with increases in immune system functioning, including helper T cell levels. Therapeutic Change: Modeling and Guided Mastery Bringing about beneficial behavior change is a critical goal to Bandura and other social‐cognitivists. Bandura embraces this goal while warning that it should be pursued cautiously; therapeutic procedures should be applied clinically only after the basic psychological mechanisms underlying change are understood. To Bandura (1977), a central mechanism of change is cognitive: perceived self‐efficacy. But the most powerful means of affecting this mechanism is behavioral: mastery experiences. If therapists can guide patients in the behavioral process of mastering challenges, changes in self‐efficacy beliefs are likely to follow. A primary therapy strategy for Bandura is modeling and guided mastery. In modeling, a client observes someone (e.g., the therapist) who displays a skill the client hopes to acquire. In guided mastery, the individual not only views a model performing beneficial behaviors, but clients also are assisted in performing the behaviors themselves. Much research indicates that guided mastery therapies are powerful and efficient (Bandura, 1997). Preliminary investigations documented their ability to reduce snake phobias, irrational fears of snakes that can interfere with daily life. In this work, Bandura and colleagues evaluated the relation between self‐efficacy perceptions and behavior change using a “microanalytic” research strategy. In this strategy, self‐efficacy and behavior are related at the level of individual acts. The strategy was executed is an experiment in which chronic snake phobics were assigned to one of three conditions: participant modeling (the therapist models the threatening activities and subjects gradually perform the tasks, with therapist assistance, until they can be performed alone); modeling (subjects observe the therapist perform the tasks but do not engage in them); and a control condition (Bandura, Adams, & Beyer, 1977). Both before and after these conditions, the subjects were tested on a Behavioral Avoidance Test (BAT), which consisted of 29 performance tasks of increasing difficulty (the final task involved letting the snake crawl in one's lap). To test the role of perceived self‐efficacy, the researchers conducted a highly detailed assessment in which they measured snake phobics' perceived self‐efficacy for performing each of a the BAT behaviors, with the self‐efficacy assessments being taken both before and after treatment. The results indicated that, as expected, participant modeling produced the strongest changes in behavior. More important for the study of perceived self‐efficacy, changes in self‐efficacy perceptions and changes in behavior were extremely closely related. At the between‐group level, the groups that achieved the greatest changes in self‐efficacy perceptions also achieved the greatest changes in behavior. At the individual level, self‐efficacy judgments were uniformly accurate predictors of performance. Indeed, self‐efficacy/behavior relations were remarkably large; Bandura and colleagues (1977) report a correlation of .84 between level of self‐efficacy and subsequent approach behavior. In sum, the data indicate not only that guided mastery is a powerful treatment, but that its power comes from its effects on self‐efficacy perceptions (also see Bandura & Adams, 1977; Bandura, Adams, & Beyer, 1977; Bandura, Reese, & Adams, 1982; Williams, 1992). This social‐cognitive approach subsequently has been applied more widely. Studies have demonstrated the role of mastery experiences and self‐efficacy perceptions in behavior change among students coping with test anxiety (Smith, 1989), combat veterans dealing with post‐traumatic stress (Benight & Bandura, 2004), athletes concerned about prospective injuries (Chase, Magyar, & Drake, 2005), and women concerned about their vulnerability to assault (Ozer & Bandura, 1990; Weitlauf, Cervone, & Smith, 2001). In the latter application, women who participated in a modeling program in which they mastered the physical skills needed to defend themselves against unarmed sexual assailants gained increased freedom of action and decreased avoidant behavior. Fundamental to all of these studies is that the experience of mastery creates a therapeutically beneficial increase in perceived self‐efficacy. Stress‐Vulnerability Signatures The CAPS model of Mischel and Shoda also has been employed to benefit therapeutic change. In one study, Shoda and colleagues (2013) sought to identify the situations that a client experiences as highly stressful and the psychological reactions they trigger. To obtain a stress vulnerability signature, the client is asked to make a daily diary of ratings of stressful situations and the situational characteristics of them. Note the emphasis on situations that are specific to the individual client, in particular the psychological situation, a procedure that is termed the Highly Repeated Within Person (HRWP) approach. In keeping with the CAPS approach, rather than an emphasis on generally stressful situations or mean levels of stress for the individual, it is the situational variability within the individual that is of interest. Whereas one client may be vulnerable to feeling excluded, another may be vulnerable to feeling irritated, and a third to feeling he or she has let others down. In addition to the mapping of the stress vulnerability signature, there is an assessment of maladaptive coping strategies. Illustrative of such strategies are blaming the self or others, avoidance, and wishful thinking. Again, these are assessed in terms of the individual client rather than some general emphasis on maladaptive strategies. Following assessment of situations and strategies, a stress management program is introduced, called the cognitive‐affective stress management training (C‐ASMT) program. This is a six‐session intervention program that targets the maladaptive cognitions through procedures such as cognitive restructuring and relaxation. For example, the client may be instructed to consider statements to the self such as “What is the worst possible outcome? How likely is this?” and to apply relaxation procedures that have been taught in the sessions. In other words, the focus is on altering specific problematic cognitions and increasing specific coping skills. The work we have just reviewed involves direct applications of social‐cognitive personality theory to clinical change. These social‐cognitive applications can be understood as part of a broad effort in psychology to identify cognitive processes that contribute to psychological distress and that can be modified to enhance well‐being. We close this chapter by briefly overviewing these efforts. Stress, Coping, and Cognitive Therapy Ever feel stressed? You're not alone. A recent survey of thousands of college students asked about factors that negatively impacted their performance at school. Students mentioned a range of challenges: homesickness, roommates, computer games, and so forth. But the difficulty that was the singularly most cited was stress. Furthermore, the next two most‐cited problems are ones that can be created by stress: feelings of anxiety and trouble getting a good night's sleep (American College Health Association, 2016). The study of stress, and of strategies to cope with it, has received much attention from personality and clinical psychologists (e.g., Folkman & Moskowitz, 2004). One primary approach is that of cognitively‐oriented researchers whose work complements social‐cognitive personality theory. A major figure in this effort was the psychologist Richard Lazarus. Lazarus explained that the experience of stress often results from the way in which individuals appraise the relation between themselves and the environment (Lazarus, 1990). Specifically, stress occurs when the person views circumstances as taxing or exceeding his or her resources and endangering well‐being. Two stages of cognitive appraisal can be distinguished. In primary appraisal, the person evaluates whether there is anything at stake in the encounter, whether there is a threat or danger. For example, is there potential harm or benefit to self‐esteem? Is one's personal health or that of a loved one at risk? In secondary appraisal, the person evaluates what, if anything, can be done to overcome harm, prevent harm, or improve the prospects for benefit. In other words, secondary appraisal involves an evaluation of the person's resources to cope with the potential harm or benefit evaluated in the stage of primary appraisal. There are different ways of coping with any given situation. A key distinction is one that differentiates between problem‐focused coping, which refers to attempts to cope by altering features of a stressful situation, and emotion‐focused coping, which refers to coping in which an individual strives to improve his or her internal emotional state, for example, by emotional distancing or the seeking of social support. Research by Folkman, Lazarus, and colleagues has developed a questionnaire to assess coping, the Ways of Coping Scale, and has explored the health implications of different coping strategies. This research suggests the following conclusions (Folkman, Lazarus, Gruen, & DeLongis, 1986; Lazarus, 1993): There is evidence of both stability and variability in the methods individuals use to cope with stressful situations. Although the use of some coping methods appears to be influenced by personality factors, the use of many coping methods appears to be strongly influenced by the situational context. In general, the greater the reported level of stress and efforts to cope, the poorer the physical health and the greater the likelihood of psychological symptoms. In contrast, the greater the sense of mastery, the better is the physical and psychological health. Although the value of a particular form of coping depends on the context in which it is used, in general, planful problem solving (“I made a plan of action and followed it” or “Just concentrate on the next step”) is a more adaptive form of coping than escape avoidance (“I hoped a miracle would happen” or “I tried to reduce tension by eating, drinking, or using drugs”) or confrontative coping (“I let my feelings out somehow” or “I expressed anger to those who caused the problem”). In addition to this conceptual analysis of stress, one wants practical procedures to reduce it. One strategy is stress inoculation training (Meichenbaum, 1995). In stress inoculation training, therapists teach clients the cognitive nature of stress. Clients learn about stress‐inducing thoughts that may pop into mind automatically (e.g., “It is such an effort to do anything”) and are instructed in new stress‐reducing ways of thinking. These new cognitive skills are designed to prepare people for—or “inoculate them against”—stressful events that will inevitably occur in the future. The training combines verbal and visual ways of thinking. In addition to learning coping statement such as “I can do it,” “One step at time,” and “Focus on the present; what is it I have to do?,” clients engage in imagery in which they mentally simulate prospective future situations that present a high risk for experiencing stress. The stress inoculation training procedure is active, focused, structured, and brief. It has been used with patients about to undergo surgery, women coping with pregnancy, athletes dealing with the stress of performance, rape victims dealing with the trauma of assault, and employees who need to work effectively in teams. Research findings document the effectiveness of this strategy for reducing stress (e.g., Khorsandi et al., 2015; Saunders, Driskell, Johnston, & Salas, 1996). Ellis's Rational‐Emotive Therapy Albert Ellis was a former psychoanalyst who developed a therapeutic system of personality change known as rational emotive‐therapy (RET) (Ellis, 1962, 1987; Ellis & Harper, 1975) or, equivalently, rational‐emotion behavior theory (REBT; e.g., Ellis & Tafrate, 1997). There are two primary theses behind Ellis's work on psychological distress and its treatment. The first thesis is that people do not respond emotionally to events in the world but to their beliefs about those events. Ellis conveys this idea simply, by suggesting an “ABC” of rational‐emotive therapy (Ellis, 1997). An activating (A) event may lead to a consequence (C) such as an emotional reaction. A person unfamiliar with Ellis's analyses may think that the A caused the C, that is, that the activating event is the cause of the emotional consequence. But not so, according to Ellis. “We … create Beliefs (Bs) between A and C. Our Bs about A largely determine our response to it” (Ellis & Tafrate, 1997, p. 31). This first premise of rational‐emotive therapy, then, is identical to the central premise of the social‐cognitive approach to personality, namely, that people's enduring belief systems are immediate determinants of their experiences and actions. Ellis's second thesis is more unique. It is his claim that the beliefs that cause psychological distress have a particular quality: They are irrational; that is, they are beliefs that no rational person would, upon reflection, wish to have because the beliefs are sure to bring about one's own psychological distress. According to Ellis, then, the causes of psychological difficulties are irrational beliefs or irrational statements we make to ourselves: beliefs, for example, that we must do something, that we have to feel some way, that other people always should treat us in a certain manner. Suppose a person thinks “If good things happen, bad things must be on the way” or “If I express my needs, others will reject me.” These thoughts are irrational in that persons who think these things are dooming themselves to psychological distress. Cognitive therapists often distinguish among alternative types of thinking that are maladaptive. The distinctions among them are not terribly important; nonetheless, listing a few can give you an idea of the type of negative thinking that Ellis and similar therapists wish to change in therapy: Faulty reasoning. “I failed on this effort, so I must be incompetent.” “They didn't respond the way I wanted them to, so they must not think much of me.” Dysfunctional expectancies. “If something can go wrong for me, it will.” “Catastrophe is just around the corner.” Negative self‐views. “I always tend to feel that others are better than me.” “Nothing I do ever turns out right.” Maladaptive attributions. “I'm a poor test‐taker because I am a nervous person.” “When I win, it's luck; when I lose, it's me.” Memory distortions. “Life is horrible now and always has been this way.” “I've never succeeded in anything.” Maladaptive attention. “All I can think about is how horrible it will be if I fail.” “It's better not to think about things; there's nothing you can do anyway.” Self‐defeating strategies. “I'll put myself down before others do.” “I'll reject others before they reject me and see if people still like me.” Ellis's therapy techniques are designed to force people to reflect on their own thinking. Rational‐emotion therapists try to make people aware of the irrationality of their own thoughts, so that they can replace these thoughts with calm, rational thinking. Therapists use a variety of techniques—logic, argument, persuasion, ridicule, humor—in an effort to change the irrational beliefs that cause psychological distress. Beck's Cognitive Therapy for Depression Like Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck is a former psychoanalyst who became disenchanted with psychoanalytic techniques and gradually developed a cognitive approach to therapy. His therapy is best known for its relevance to the treatment of depression, but it has relevance to a wider variety of psychological disorders. According to Beck (1987), psychological difficulties are due to automatic thoughts, dysfunctional assumptions, and negative self‐statements. The Cognitive Triad of Depression Beck's cognitive model of depression emphasizes that a depressed person systematically misevaluates ongoing and past experiences, leading to views of the self as a loser, the world as frustrating, and the future as bleak. These three negative views are known as the cognitive triad and include negative views of the self such as “I am inadequate, undesirable, worthless,” negative views of the world such as “The world makes too many demands on me and life represents constant defeat,” and negative views of the future such as “Life will always involve the suffering and deprivation it has for me now.” In addition, a depressed person is prone to faulty information processing, such as in magnifying everyday difficulties into disasters and overgeneralizing from a single instance of rejection to the belief that “Nobody likes me.” It is these thinking problems, these negative schemas and cognitive errors, that cause depression. Research on Faulty Cognitions Considerable research has examined whether faulty cognitions are related to symptoms of depression, as Beck's theory anticipates. Much research in the 1980s and 1990s provided evidence that was consistent with Beck's model (Segal & Dobson, 1992). Compared to nondepressed individuals, depressed persons appeared to focus more on themselves (Wood, Saltzberg, & Goldsamt, 1990), to have more accessible negative self‐constructs (Bargh & Tota, 1988; Strauman, 1990), and to have a bias toward pessimism rather than optimism, particularly in relation to the self (Epstein, 1992; Taylor & Brown, 1988). Much of the early research on cognition and depression employed “concurrent” research designs, that is, research plans in which cognitions and depressive symptoms are measured at the same time. Concurrent designs have a big drawback: It is hard to know if relations between cognition and depression reflect (1) the influence of cognition on depression (as Beck and other cognitive theorists predict), (2) the influence of depressed emotions on cognition, or (3) the influence of some third factor that affects both cognition and depression (e.g., negative life events that affect people's beliefs and emotional experiences). Cognitive theories can be evaluated more convincingly through the use of “prospective” research designs, that is, research in which cognitive factors are measured at one point in time and are used to predict the development of depressive symptoms at later times. Fortunately, in recent years, investigators have turned to prospective research designs. For example, Hankin, Fraley, and Abela (2005) asked participants, at the outset of a study, to complete a questionnaire that measured their tendencies to engage in negative patterns of thinking that were thought to predispose persons to becoming depressed. They then asked these same research participants to complete a daily diary for a period of 35 days. Individual differences in the tendency to thinking negatively, as assessed at the outset of the study, predicted the subsequent occurrence of depressive symptoms; that is, the cognitive factor predicted depressive symptoms during the following 35 days during which people completed the diary (Hankin et al., 2005). One of the puzzling questions for psychologists who emphasize the role of faulty cognitions in depression is the following: What happens to the faulty cognitions when the depression has lifted? This question is important because once a person has experienced a serious depression, the tendency for that person is to fall into a relapse or another depression. Why should this be the case if the faulty cognitions are gone? There is some evidence that the faulty cognitions that make the person vulnerable to depression are latent and become manifest only under conditions of stress (Alloy, Abramson, & Francis, 1999. For example, people vulnerable to depression may retain negative attitudes toward the self that only become manifest and operational when they experience blows to their self‐esteem. The task of therapy, then, is to affect fundamental change in these cognitions as well as to make the person aware of the conditions under which they become operational. Cognitive Therapy Cognitive therapy of depression is designed to identify and correct distorted conceptualizations and dysfunctional beliefs (Beck, 1993; Brewin, 1996). Therapy generally consists of 15–25 sessions at weekly intervals. The approach is described as involving highly specific learning experiences designed to teach the patient to monitor negative, automatic thoughts, to recognize how these thoughts lead to problematic feelings and behaviors, to examine the evidence for and against these thoughts, and to substitute more reality‐oriented interpretations for these biased cognitions. The therapist helps the patient to see that interpretations of events lead to depressed feelings. For example, the following exchange between therapist (T) and patient (P) might occur: P: I get depressed when things go wrong. Like when I fail a test. T: How can failing a test make you depressed? P: Well, if I fail I'll never get into law school. T: So failing the test means a lot to you. But if failing a test could drive people into clinical depression, wouldn't you expect everyone who failed the test to have a depression? Did everyone who failed get depressed enough to require treatment? P: No, but it depends on how important the test was to the person. T: Right, and who decides the importance? p: I do. Source: Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979, p. 146. In addition to the examination of beliefs for their logic, validity, and adaptiveness, behavioral assignments are used to help the patient test certain maladaptive cognitions and assumptions. This may involve the assignment of activities designed to result in success and pleasure. In general, the therapy focuses on specific target cognitions that are seen as contributing to the depression. Beck contrasts cognitive therapy with traditional analytic therapy in terms of the therapist's being continuously active in structuring the therapy, in the focus on the here and now, and in the emphasis on conscious factors. Beck's cognitive therapy has been expanded to include the treatment of other psychological difficulties, including anxiety, personality disorders, drug abuse, and marital difficulties (Beck, 1993). The idea is that each difficulty is associated with a distinctive pattern of beliefs. Whereas in depression the beliefs concern failure and self‐worth, in anxiety, for example, they concern danger. There is evidence for the effectiveness of cognitive therapy (Antonuccio, Thomas, & Danton, 1997). Although the distinctive therapeutic features of cognitive therapy and whether changes in beliefs are the key therapeutic ingredients remain to be determined (Dobson & Shaw, 1995), evidence suggests that therapeutic change indeed follows cognitive change (Tang & De Rubeis, 1999a, 1999b). The Case of Jim Twenty years ago Jim was assessed from various theoretical points of view: psychoanalytic, phenomenological, personal construct, and trait. At the time, social‐cognitive theory was just beginning to evolve, and thus he was not considered from this standpoint. Later, however, it was possible to gather at least some data from this theoretical standpoint as well. Although comparisons with earlier data may be problematic because of the time lapse, we can gain at least some insight into Jim's personality from this theoretical point of view. We do so by considering Jim's goals, reinforcers he experiences, and his self‐efficacy beliefs. Jim was asked about his goals for the immediate future and for the long‐range future. He felt that his immediate and long‐term goals were pretty much the same: (1) getting to know his son and being a good parent, (2) becoming more accepting and less critical of his wife and others, and (3) feeling good about his professional work as a consultant. Generally, he feels that there is a good chance of achieving these goals but is guarded in that estimate, with some uncertainty about just how much he will be able to “get out of myself” and thereby be more able to give to his wife and child. Jim also was asked about positive and aversive reinforcers, things that were important to him that he found rewarding or unpleasant. Concerning positive reinforcers, Jim reported that money was “a biggie”. In addition, he emphasized time with loved ones, the glamour of going to an opening night, and generally going to the theater or movies. He had a difficult time thinking of aversive reinforcers. He described writing as a struggle and then noted, “I'm having trouble with this.” Jim also discussed another social‐cognitive variable: his competencies or skills (both intellectual and social). He reported that he considered himself to be very bright and functioning at a very high intellectual level. He felt that he writes well from the standpoint of a clear, organized presentation, but he had not written anything that is innovative or creative. Jim also felt that he was very skilled socially: “I do it naturally, easily, well. I can pull off anything and have a lot of confidence in myself socially. I am at ease with both men and women, in both professional and social contexts.” The one social concern noted was his constant struggle with “how egocentric I should be, how personally to take things.” He felt that sometimes he takes things too personally: “My security is based on how I'm doing with others. I put a lot of energy into friendships, and when I'm relating well I feel good.” In terms of self‐efficacy beliefs, Jim had many positive views of himself. He believes that he does most things well; he is a good athlete, a competent consultant, bright, and socially skilled. Does he have areas of low self‐efficacy? Jim mentioned three: that he does not genuinely accept his wife; a difficulty “getting out of myself so that I can be genuinely devoted to others”; and, third, creativity: “I know I'm not good at being creative, so I don't try it.” It also was informative to consider irrational beliefs, dysfunctional thoughts, and cognitive distortions. Jim described his tendency to overpersonalize: “This is a problem of mine. If someone doesn't call, I attribute it to a feeling state in relation to me. I can feel terribly injured at times.” In his responses to the Automatic Thoughts Questionnaire (Hollon & Kendall, 1980) he reported having the following thoughts frequently: “I've let people down,” “I wish I were a better person,” “I'm disappointed in myself,” and “I can't stand this.” These frequent thoughts have to do with his not being as loving or generous as he would like, his being very demanding of himself professionally and in athletics, his obsession about things that might go wrong, and his intolerance of things not going his way. For example, he cannot stand to be in traffic and will say “I can't stand this. This is intolerable.” Jim did not think much of Ellis's work, and an interview suggested that he didn't have many irrational beliefs, yet on a questionnaire he checked four out of nine items as frequent thoughts of his: “I must have love or approval,” “When people act badly, I blame them,” “I tend to view it as a catastrophe when I get seriously frustrated or feel rejected,” and “I tend to get preoccupied with things that seem fearsome.” He also described his tendency to catastrophize if he is going to be late for a movie: “It's a calamity if I'm going to be one minute late. It becomes a life and death emergency. I go through red lights, honk the horn, and pound on the wheel.” This is in contrast to his own tendency to be at least a few minutes late for virtually all appointments, though rarely by more than a few minutes. In some ways the social‐cognitive data on Jim are more limited than those associated with the previous theories of personality. We learn about important aspects of Jim's life, but clearly there also are major gaps. There are two reasons for this. First, only a limited amount of time was available for assessment. Second, and perhaps more important, social‐cognitive theorists have not developed comprehensive personality assessment tests; only recently have social‐cognitive investigators turned their attention explicitly to questions of personality assessment (Cervone, Shadel, & Jencius, 2001). In part, the previous lack of attention reflected social‐cognitive theory's conviction that systematic research and the testing of hypotheses, rather than the in‐depth study of individuals, is critical to building a scientifically valid personality theory. It perhaps also reflected the social‐cognitive criticism of traditional approaches to assessment that emphasize broad personality consistencies across many domains. In this regard, it is interesting that Jim had difficulty articulating differences in his functioning in various areas. In this sense, he functions much more like a traditional personality theorist than like a social‐cognitive theorist, although with further questioning he probably would have been able to specify ways in which his goals, reinforcers, competencies, and self‐efficacy beliefs varied from context to context. From a social‐cognitive perspective, what can be said about Jim as he approaches midlife? We see that in general Jim has a strong sense of self‐efficacy in relation to intellectual and social skills, though he feels less efficacious in relation to creative thought and the ability to be loving, generous, and giving to people who are dear to him. He values money and financial success but has settled more on family intimacy and the quality of his work as a consultant as goals for the future. He has a strong sense of individual responsibility and belief in personal control over events. There is a streak of pessimism and depression to him. He is bothered by concerns about the approval of others, by his perfectionism and impatience, and by a tendency to worry about things. He tends to be self‐controlled in coping with stress rather than avoiding problems or escaping from them. Generally he sees himself as a competent person and is guardedly optimistic about his chances of achieving his goals in the future. Critical Evaluation Scientific Observation: The Database We turn now to a critical evaluation of this last of the personality theories we present, social‐cognitive theory (Table 13.1). As in our prior evaluations, we first assess the quality of the scientific observations that furnish the database on which the theory rests. TABLE 13.1 Summary of Strengths and Limitations of Social‐Cognitive Theory Strengths Limitations Has impressive research record Considers important phenomena Shows consistent development Focuses attention on important Is not a systematic, unified theory Contains potential problems associated with the use of verbal self‐report Requires more exploration and elaboration as a theory development in certain areas (e.g., motivation, affect, system properties of personality organization) Provides findings concerning therapy theoretical issues that are tentative rather than conclusive On this criterion, social‐cognitive theory excels. Bandura, Mischel, and colleagues have built their theory on a systematic accumulation of objective scientific evidence. A particularly outstanding feature of this database is its diversity. To test claims that social‐cognitive processes causally influence personality functioning, social‐cognitivists have run controlled laboratory experiments. To study the development of individual differences, they have run correlational studies and employed longitudinal methods. To study behavior change, they have conducted clinical outcome studies. The participants in their studies have been diverse: children, adolescents, and adults; people suffering from psychological distress; high‐functioning members of the population at large. They have employed a variety of research methods: self‐report questionnaires; parental and peer reports of personality; direct observations of behavior in natural settings; measures of cognitive processes in the laboratory. Of all the approaches to personality, social‐cognitive theory and the trait theories are built on the largest and most systematic sets of scientific evidence. This surely is why they long have been the two most influential frameworks in modern personality science (Cervone, 1991). Theory: Systematic? Social‐cognitive theory has many strengths. But its ability to provide a theory that is systematic—that is, in which all theoretical elements are coherently interrelated—traditionally has not been one of them. For many years, social‐cognitive theory did not provide an overarching network of assumptions that coherently tied together all elements of the theoretical perspective. The approach sometimes functions more as a strategy or framework for studying personality than a fully specified theory. Investigators have been aware of this; for example, Shoda and Mischel (2006) have referred to their CAPS model as a “meta‐theory”: not a full‐fledged theory of personality, but a conceptual framework within which further theorizing could develop. This is the limitation that the KAPA model of personality architecture was designed to address. Two main steps taken by the KAPA model were to identify (a) principles with which one can distinguish between social‐cognitive structure and process variables and (b) psychological dynamics through which structures and processes are related. These were designed as steps in the direction of a more systematic social‐cognitive theory—one that provides theoretical tools that are sufficient to guide the practical task of personality assessment and the scientific challenge of identifying cross‐situational consistency in experience and behavior. Theory: Testable? Social‐cognitive theorists unquestionably have succeeded in providing a personality theory that is testable. This is evident if one reflects on the research studies we have reviewed in the past two chapters. They could have come out differently; the social‐cognitive hypotheses could have been proven wrong. It is possible that participant modeling would not have been such a success, or that attentional factors would not have been so important to delay of gratification, or that self‐efficacy beliefs would have been unrelated to behavior once one controlled for “third variables”. In these and numerous other cases, social‐cognitive theorists defined their constructs with clarity and provided measurement tools and experimental methods that enabled their ideas to be tested. On this criterion, social‐cognitive theory gets high marks. Theory: Comprehensive? Social‐cognitive theory is quite comprehensive. Theorists have addressed questions of motivation, development, self‐concept, self‐control, and behavioral change. The approach even addresses a topic that is skipped in most other personality theories: the learning of social skills and other behavioral competencies. Yet there also are ways in which social‐cognitive theory lacks comprehensiveness. Some aspects of the human experience simply have received little attention from social‐cognitive theorists. For example, biological forces of maturation would appear important to people's experiences of the world; sexual feelings in adolescence or a desire for parenting in adulthood may reflect biological rather than social and cognitive features of personality. But these maturational factors receive relatively little formal attention in social‐cognitive theory. Inherited temperament may interact with social experience in the development of social‐cognitive systems, but these interactions have received less attention in research than they deserve. Other important types of experience—for example, mental conflict, feelings of alienation or anomie, existential concerns about death—similarly have not been systematically targeted in social‐cognitive theorizing. Social‐cognitive theory has expanded gradually over the years. Expansions that include topics such as those listed here are a challenge for future work. Social‐Cognitive Theory at a Glance Theorist or Theory Structure Process Social‐Cognitive Theory Competencies, Beliefs, Goals, Evaluative Standards Cognitive and affective processing system functions in reciprocal interaction with the social environment, especially in observational learning, self‐regulated motivation, and self‐control Applications Social‐cognitive theorists have succeeded admirably in applying their theory to the solution of social problems and the alleviation of psychological distress. Indeed, no personality theory exceeds the social‐cognitive theorists' level of success on this point. Both Bandura and Mischel were trained as clinicians, and this surely heightened their awareness of the need to apply basic theory to practical concerns. Two features contribute greatly to social‐cognitive theorists' success in relating theory to practice. One is that they did not artificially separate “basic” and “clinical” research. Instead, they pursued basic research questions in clinical contexts; for example, the first experimental tests of self‐efficacy theory were done in a clinical setting (with snake phobics). The other is that the social‐cognitive theorists wrote books that were central to the professional training of many other psychologists who, in turn, advanced psychological applications. Bandura's (1969) volume on behavior therapy was used as a textbook by many clinicians who advanced cognitive‐behavioral therapy in the last third of the 20th century. Mischel's (1968) volume on personality assessment and prediction taught applied psychologists lessons about the limitations of behavioral predictions based on traditional psychodynamic or trait‐theoretic assessments. Growth and Development Pathology Change Social learning through observation and direct experience; development of self‐efficacy judgments and standards for self‐regulation Learned response patterns; excessive self‐standards; problems in self‐efficacy Modeling; guided mastery; increased self‐efficacy Major Contributions and Summary Social‐cognitive theory is a current favorite among academic personality psychologists. Many clinicians also would label themselves social‐cognitive psychologists. The two main social‐cognitive theorists, Bandura and Mischel, are two of the most eminent figures to be found in any branch of the psychological sciences. Numerous factors have contributed to the success of the approach. Some were cited in this chapter: its large and systematic database, the testability of its formulations, the applicability of its theoretical principles. Yet one last meritorious feature should be noted. It is that social‐cognitive theorists have been open to change. They have incorporated ongoing scientific advances into their theory, modifying features of the work as facts dictate. A comparison of Social Learning and Personality Development (1963) by Bandura and Walters with the latest formulations of social‐cognitive theory (Bandura, 2006; Mischel & Shoda, 2008) testifies to the rapid evolution of the approach. The early work is described by the authors themselves as a “socio‐behavioristic approach” (Bandura & Walters, 1963, p. 1). Contemporary work is miles from behaviorism, with theorists now explicating the uniquely human cognitive capabilities that are the basis of human agency. We anticipate that social‐cognitive theory will continue to evolve in the years ahead. MAJOR CONCEPTS Dysfunctional expectancies Dysfunctional self‐evaluations Emotion‐focused coping General principles approach Guided mastery Implicit theories Knowledge‐and‐appraisal personality architecture or KAPA Learning goals Performance goals Problem‐focused coping Schemas Self‐discrepancies Self‐enhancement Self‐verification Self‐schemas Stress inoculation training Working self‐concept REVIEW Much research in the social‐cognitive tradition has explored three cognitive components of personality: beliefs, goals, and evaluative standards. The study of beliefs has included research on the role of cognitive generalizations about the self, or self‐schemas. Research on goals has explored differences between types of goals, including learning versus performance goals. Work on evaluative standards has explored discrepancies between people's views of their actual self and standards representing ideals versus oughts, or obligations. Research has established that people's thoughts about the causes of significant life events, or attributions about the events, significantly influence motivation and emotional reactions. In clinical applications, social‐cognitive theory rejects the medical symptom/disease model of psychopathology, emphasizing instead the dysfunctional learning of behaviors, expectancies, standards for self‐reward, and, most significantly, self‐efficacy beliefs. Dysfunctional learning can occur through the observation of models, in particular through vicarious conditioning, or through direct experience. According to social‐cognitive theory, there are two key points in bringing about psychological change in therapy. One is that low levels of perceived self‐efficacy contribute to a wide variety of psychological dysfunctions, including anxiety and depression. The other is that self‐efficacy perceptions can be increased therapeutically, especially through modeling and guided mastery therapies. In modeling, models demonstrate the skills and subskills necessary in specific situations. In guided participation, the person is assisted in performing these modeled behaviors. Research supports the use of these procedures in raising the perception of self‐efficacy. In relation to the theories considered previously, social‐cognitive theory emphasizes (a) conscious cognitive processes and experimental data as opposed to the psychoanalytic emphasis on unconscious processes and clinical data; (b) the role of social context and contextual variability in cognition and action, as opposed to the global self‐conceptions emphasized by Rogers; and (c) personal capabilities for action, including people's potential to control and alter their own typical patterns of behavior, rather than the stable dispositional tendencies emphasized in the trait conceptions of personality. Social‐cognitive theory's strengths include its ability to bring systematic research to bear on important problems of personality functioning and social behavior. Its primary limit is that it is not yet a wholly unified, systematic theory. A primary challenge to social‐cognitive theorists is to relate the development of social‐cognitive structures to inherited biological qualities that contribute to individual differences.