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Social Learning Theory

Bandura called his theory a social cognitive theory. Like other behaviourists, Bandura believes that cognitive development alone cannot explain changes in behaviour in childhood and he believed that learning processes are primarily responsible for children’s development. However, he felt quite strongly that the cognitive abilities of the child affect learning processes. This, he feels, is especially true of the more complex types of learning.

Kids as well as adults do copy from others; specially follow the famous players, celebrities and even their friends or their favourites. This is done by observing the behaviour of other people or the environment. In social learning theory Albert Bandura (1977) states behaviour is learned from the environment through the process of observational learning.  Children observe the people around them behaving in various ways. This is illustrated during the famous Bobo doll experiment (Bandura, 1961).

Individuals that are observed are called models. In the society children are surrounded by many influencing models, such as family members, teachers, friends, peer groups and media. These models provide examples of masculine and feminine behaviour to observe and imitate.

They pay attention to models and encode the behaviour and later they imitate the behaviour.  There are four steps involve in observing the behaviour from the surrounding.

1.                Attention: by paying attention observe the behaviour

2.               Retention: remembering what is observed from surrounding.

3.               Reproduction: imitate or copy the observed behaviour.

4.               Motivation: Reasons to imitate. In this process, the observer expects to receive positive reinforcements for the modelled behaviour.

Environmental experiences are a second influence of the social learning of violence in children. According to Albert Bandura, children who live in high crime rates areas are more likely to act violently than those who live in low crime area. In our classrooms, the indisciplined students are from broken families and instable families. They acts and wordings are similar to their families.

The media plays a very vital role in social learning or in other words the media affects the behaviour or children and adults. People wants to be heroes, so change the hair style, costumes and even behaviour according to their favourite hero. For example, John Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Ronald Regen after he watched the movie “Taxi Driver” fifteen times. In the movie “Born innocent,” a girl raped with a bottled by four other girls. In 1974, a similar incident happened to a California’s girl. The girl who raped her testifies in court that they had witness the same scene in Born Innocent”. (Siegel,1992: p. 172)

Therefore, to build a beneficial generation or a child need to show and demonstrate all the good qualities and values from the parents, schools and other aspects of the society. Children learn from the observations from their surrounding environment.