Bandura Social Learning Theory, Cognitive And Integration Characteristics

Albert Bandura is a famous psychologist who studied human's society behavior by cognition method. But Bandura broke through the traditional study frame of behaviorism, and absorbed one of the important aspects of cognitive psychology which had been emphasizing on the research of internal cognition process, such as sensation, thought, memory and language etc. He emphasized on the function of human factor especially the cognition factor in people's activities. The key to understand Bandura' academic thought is that Bandura studied people's cognition factor and the interaction between cognition behavior and social environment systematically and deeply. He combined reinforcement theory and cognition theory in his theory, and that was called cognitive behaviorism by some scholars. Bandura not only had combined inherent and external influencing factor of human behavior, but also drawn lessons from the positive aspect of the humanism psychology and thought that psychology should research in human's existence, values and so on. Also he absorbed many positive factors of different psychological schools. Just like what Baron pointed out: "More than one hundred years, psychologists have been seeking for a kind of 'grand theory' which explained mankind behavior-This kind of theory wants to offer a synthesis, accurate and effectual explanation about the complicated human behavior. Though the social cognitive theory had not offered such an explanation to us yet, from his wide and profound theory system, I have seen the dawn of the great theory which we longed for. Accordingly, we can say that the synthesis characteristics of Bandura's research in people opened up a new field of psychology to research behaviorism."Bandura published "Social learning theory" in 1977, "Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory" in 1986 and "Self-efficacy: Thought control of action" in 1997. All of the books mentioned above embodied his emphasis on the importance and the course of system research of cognition. In those books Bandura merged all positive aspects of Behaviorism psychology, Humanistic psychology and Cognition psychology.Bandura's main psychological thought can adequately reflect in social learning theory. The former scholars who studied Bandura's social learning theory mostly focused on the analysis of its macroscopic characteristics. But I think that Bandura's cognition and integration characteristic permeates into all respects of his theory. Only the analysis of the microscopic characteristic of his theory can we lay out Bandura's expansion of the cognition meaning, perceive his incisive analysis about the function mechanism of cognition in behavior and make us easy understand the integration characteristic of his thought. This article tries to describe and analyze Bandura's social learning theory, further to sum up its philosophical and psychological basis; By deeply analyzing in the triadic reciprocal determinism, observational learning and self-efficacy, I want to refine out the character of the combination between behavior and cognition, meanwhile, this article attempts to demonstrate the importance of Bandura' social learning theory in combining Behaviorism psychology, Cognition psychology and Humanistic psychology. This thesis has shortage in Chapter Two whose discussion is unbalanced. Because Bandura's theory is new, my analysis on self-efficiency is more exhaustive. While the characteristic analysis of the triadic reciprocal determinism and observational learning theory still need to be improved.The article will analyze and comment in Bandura's social learning theory from the following three aspects.Firstly, the philosophical and psychological basis of Bandura's social learning theory.Secondly, analyzing the cognitive inclination and integration character of Bandura's theory from three key elements of Bandura' social learning theory: triadic reciprocal determinism (focusing on the relationship between environment and particular), observational learning (the new form of social learning), and self-efficacy (studying the particular characteristic in the learning process).Thirdly, the positive sides in modern society and limitations of Bandura's social learning theory.