0.17 Social learning theory and personality development  (Page 27/30)

Being an agent involves intentionally influencing one’s functioning and life circumstances, and there are four core properties of human agency. Intentionality refers to our ability to form action plans and the strategies necessary for accomplishing them. Forethought is the temporal extension of agency, in which we set goals for ourselves and anticipate likely outcomes of our actions to both guide and motivate our behavior. Once having chosen a course of action, of course, we do not simply sit back and wait for the right things to happen. Agency also involves both self-reactiveness and self-reflectiveness , processes in which we regulate our behavior, monitor our courses of action, and examine whether we are capable of being successful in our various endeavors (Bandura, 2006). As much as human agency involves our own thoughts, goals, motivation, and expectations, however, we do not exist autonomously. All human behavior occurs within social structures, and there is a reciprocal interplay between personal, behavioral, and environmental determinants (reciprocal determinism). This means that human agency, the exercise of self-influence, is part of the causal structure of our lives. As Bandura points out, this is not “free will,” which would be a throwback to medieval theology, but rather a matter of acting as an agent, the role of an individual in making causal contributions to the course of events in their life (Bandura, 2006).

…Social cognitive theory rejects a duality of human agency and a disembodied social structure. Social systems are the product of human activity, and social systems, in turn, help to organize, guide, and regulate human affairs. However, in the dynamic interplay within the societal rule structures, there is considerable personal variation in the interpretation of, adoption of, enforcement of, circumvention of, and opposition to societal prescriptions and sanctions…freedom is conceived not just passively as the absence of constraints, but also proactively as the exercise of self-influence… (pg. 165; Bandura, 2006)

Personality Theory in Real Life: Media Violence

and Its Effects on Children

The second Bobo doll study conducted by Bandura and his colleagues presented videotapes of the models behaving aggressively toward the Bobo doll (Bandura, Ross,&Ross, 1963a). The observation in this study that children did, indeed, imitate the aggressive behavior of models seen on film, but not in person, has become one the most influential articles in history, both in terms of stimulating further research on the modeling of aggression and in terms of practical applications (e.g., ratings on television programs, video games, and CDs with controversial lyrics). In their introduction to an issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest ( PSPI ) on media violence and its effects on children, Ceci and Bjork (2003) describe how the authors of this particular PSPI issue were a collection of experts brought together to prepare a portion of the U.S. Surgeon General’s report on youth violence. However, political concerns led the Surgeon General’s office to radically alter the report. The authors protested, and attempted to satisfy the concerns of the politicians. Ultimately, however, this portion of the report was dropped from the final version. So, the editors of PSPI chose to publish this valuable psychological information, which clearly causes political concerns for some, so that psychologists, psychiatrists, law enforcement officials, teachers and school administrators, government policy makers, parents, indeed anyone who has a vested interest in youth violence, might have the most current information available on the effects of media violence on America’s youth. I would also like to acknowledge an important point made by the authors themselves. This issue of PSPI was a collaborative project by eight experts on the effects of media violence. The authors decided that the fairest way to list their names was alphabetical order. Thus, as I refer to the article as Anderson, et al. (2003), please note that the “et al.” includes widely respected experts, chosen by the National Institute of Mental Health for this project, each of whom contributed significantly to this article.