Research On Mischel's Cognitive Social Learning Theory

Cognitive social learning theory is an important approach in psychological research nowadays. Mischel is one of the most important advocates of this approach. Someone once has said that Mischel and Bandura had influenced the direction of psychology in the last 50 years of 21st century to some extent. In western countries his thoughts have received high praises and produced wide influence. But in China few psychologists has introduced him and the scholars know little about his ideas. So the author would introduce and analyze Mischel's cognitive social learning theory to provide more helpful experiences and instructions for personality psychology and the experiment study in child development psychology in China.Mischel has done a lot of work on delay of gratification and established the research paradigm in this area. So he can be called the leading figure in the study of delay of gratification. In correlation study he found that the preference of choosing to delay was related to social responsibility, misbehavior, father absence, intelligence and achievement needs. Through experiment studies he found that the subjects would give more values to the prices which he expected couldn't get than those he believed could get. The real models would have more endure and stable influence on children's delay behaviors than the symbolic models. It was not the real objects the children faced but the internal cognitive representation that influenced the children's delay behavior during the delay of gratification. The young children would use the inverse strategies to spend the waiting period. The more efforts they made to avert the attention from the objects they faced the more attention they paid to the consummatory properties of the objects. Then the strategies they used would make the waiting more difficult. But when they grew older they learned to transform the stimulus into abstract representations. It was most interesting that the minutes the children could delay in childhood could predict thecognitive and self-regulatory abilities more than ten years later, and it was positively correlated with the adolescents' scholastic achievement and the success in interpersonal relationship.Mischel criticized the traditional personality theories that were psychodynamic theory, trait theory and behavior personality theory. Based on these works he emphasized the individual as an agent, the cognitive processes and mental structure underlying the individual differences. Influenced by Kelly's personal construct theory and Rotter's social learning theory Mischel used five cognitive social learning variables to interpret the individual differences. These variables are cognitive and behavioral construction competencies, encoding strategies and personal constructs, behavior-outcome and stimulus-outcome expectancies, subjective stimulus values and self-regulatory systems and plans. He emphasized the role of specific situation and the social roots of behaviors. The interactions between individuals and situations were thought to be the causes of the individual performances. Mischel and his student Cantor studied the cognitive prototype approach used by individual to classify persons and situations. Furthermore Mischel underlined the systematic research and tried to addresses the cumulative findings in personality and social behavior study for many years within a comprehensive framework. In 1995 Mischel and Yuichi Shoda extended the social cognitive approach to involve the emotions and personal goal in individual variables and called them as cognitive-affective units. In this theory the cognitive representations interact with emotional state. The organization between the cognitive-affective units makes up the core of personality.There are two hypotheses in the cognitive-affective personality theory. One is that individuals differ in chronic accessibility of cognitive-affective units and the other is that individual differences in the organization of the cognitive-affective units. According to these hypotheses Mischel suggested tha...