Cognitive and Social Learning
Approaches to Personality
Cognition
• A general term referring
to awareness and
thinking
• Basic focus of cognitive
approach to person is
differences in how
people think.
• Approach grew rapidly
in 1970s-80s.
• Information Processing:
the transformation of
sensory input into
mental representations
and manipulations of
such representations
Three Levels of Analysis in the Cognitive Approach
• Perception
– Field Dependence/Independence (Witkin)
– Reducer/Augmenter Theory of Pain Tolerance (Petrie)
• Interpretation
– Personal Construct Theory (Kelly)
– Locus of Control (Rotter)
– Learned Helplessness (Seligman)
• Conscious Goals
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–
–
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Personal Projects Analysis (Little)
Theory of Mastery Orientation (Dweck)
Theory of Regulatory Focus (Higgins)
Cognitive-Affective Personality System—CAPS (Mischel)
Field Dependence
• Have a hard time seeing the trees for the
forest; interested in the big picture, not the
details
• Known as global learners
• Attentive to social cues; people-oriented
• Tend to get along well with others
• Tend to major in social sciences &
education
Field Independence
• Can’t see the forest for the trees; focused on
details
• Known as analytical learners
• Function more independently
• More detached from others
• Prefer natural science, math, engineering as
majors
• More creative
Research findings
• Field independent
people
– learn 2nd languages better
– Better able to interpret facial
expressions in complex
photographs
– Do better with web-based
“sensory overload” tasks
– Perform better in high-stress,
ambiguous situations (police
officers)
– More easily find patterns and
make generalizations
• Field dependent people
– Better social skills
– More interested in
content, not grammar
– Have a harder time
ignoring distracting
information
How Field Independence/Dependence is Assessed
• Witkin first used the Rod and Frame Test in
which Ss had to sit in a dark room and adjust a
rod until it was perpendicular to a frame
• Easier method today is the Embedded Figures
Test (EFT), which can be adapted for children
and for group settings.
• EFT is often used in education.
Reducer/Augmenter Theory
• Petrie—induced pain in Ss to see how much they could
tolerate.
• Theorized that people who could tolerate pain well had a
nervous system that dampened/reduced the effects of
sensory stimulation.
• Seems to be related to extraversion and sensation-seeking.
• Low pain tolerance people augment or amplify the perception
of sensory information.
• Theory came to be known as Reducer/Augmenter
Theory.
Findings regarding Reducer/Augmenter Theory
• Reducers
– drink more coffee, smoke
more, and have a lower
threshold for boredom than
augmenters do.
– Reducers start smoking at an
earlier age, have episodes of
minor delinquency in
adolescence, use more
psychoactive drugs, and listen
to louder music.
– They may use substances to
artificially lift their arousal.
• Augmenters
– Show larger brain responses
to flashes of light and bursts
of noise than reducers do.
– Show a steeper rate of
change with increasing
stimulus intensity.
– Differences seem to arise in
infancy.
GEORGE KELLY: PERSONAL CONSTRUCT THEORY
• Born in Kansas in 1905
• Parents were very religious
• Originally interested in
physics and math but
changed to clinical
psychology and education
• Most of career was spent at
Ohio State.
Kelly’s Basic Beliefs
• Humans as scientists
– People try to understand, predict, and control
events in their lives
– They’re less distressed if they have an explanation
of why something occurred.
– We’re motivated to find meaning in our life
circumstances and use this meaning to anticipate
what will happen next.
Personal Constructs
• Beliefs about the world that serve as our
hypotheses to make the world meaningful
• Usually bipolar (opposite) categorical concepts
(attractive/unattractive, intelligent/not smart,
friendly/hostile)
• We use these constructs in our first
impressions of others and automatically
categorize them into our categorical
constructs.
Personality
• According to Kelly, personality consists of differences
in how we construe the world, especially the social
world.
• Some people have more cognitive complexity than
others, as measured by The Role Construct Repertory
Test (REP Test).
• People high in cognitive complexity are better able to
predict what others will do and relate to them.
Anxiety, according to Kelly
• Anxiety is the result of not being able to
understand and predict life events
• Unpredictability anxiety
• The result of our personal constructs failing to
make sense of our circumstances
• Constructs that are either too rigid or are
applied too liberally fail.
Steps of Therapy
• Kelly’s therapy was known as reconstruction.
• Used role-playing in his theory
• Two steps:
– Elaborating the complaint
– Elaborating the construct system
Locus of Control (Julian Rotter)
• Describes one’s perception of responsibility for the events in
his or her life
• Is responsibility located internally or externally?
• Rotter was a social learning theorist who studied how people
have different expectations for reinforcement.
• Some people believe they are in control of the reinforcement.
These are called internals.
• Others fail to see the link between their behavior and
reinforcement (externals).
• This is Rotter’s expectancy model of learning.
Generalized Expectancies
• Generalized expectancies: a person’s expectations for
reinforcement hold across a variety of situations.
• External locus of control—generalized expectancy
that events are outside of one’s control (based on
luck, chance, fate)
• Internal locus of control—generalized expectancy
that one has control over events
• Internal LOC is associated with better outcomes.
Learned Helplessness
• Animals (including humans) when subjected
to unpleasant and inescapable circumstances,
become passive and accepting of a situation,
in effect learning to be helpless
• Originated from learning theory
• Associated with Martin Seligman
Explanatory Styles
• Explanatory style:
– Tendency that some people have to use certain
attributional categories when explaining causes of
events
• Three broad categories of attributions
1. External or internal
2. Stable or unstable
3. Global or specific
More about Explanatory Styles
• Optimistic explanatory style
– Unstable
– External
– Specific
• Pessimistic explanatory style
– Stable
– Internal
– Global
Personality Revealed Through Goals
• Focus of this approach is on intention—what
the person wants to happen; what they want
to achieve in life.
Little’s Personal Projects Analysis
• Personal project—a set of relevant actions
intended to achieve a goal that one has
selected.
• Little believes personal projects reflect
personality because they reflect how people
navigate through their daily life.
Findings regarding Personal Projects
• Neurotic people rate projects as stressful, difficult, likely to
end in failure, and outside their control. They don’t make
much progress toward goals.
• Overall happiness is related to feeling in control of personal
projects.
• Low stress, high control, and high optimism regardless
projects predict overall levels of happiness and life
satisfaction.
Bandura’s Social Learning Theory
• Bandura was trained as a
classical behaviorist.
• Bobo doll experiments—
”discovered” observational
learning.
• Argued that people are
reflective, have intentions &
forethought, and can
monitor their progress
toward goals, and can learn
through observation.
Self-Efficacy
• The belief that you can accomplish what you
set out to achieve.
High SelfEfficacy
Better
performance
Effort &
persistence
Dweck’s Theory of Mastery Orientation
• Looked at differences in students who persisted in the face of
failure and those who gave up.
• Found that their implicit beliefs about the nature of
intelligence impacted how they approached challenging tasks.
• Entity theory of intelligence: some people view intelligence
as fixed and unchangeable; shy away from challenges & give
up in face of failure
• Incremental theory of intelligence: view intelligence as
changeable with hard work. Set mastery goals and seek
challenges.
• We should praise effort, not ability.
The Theory of Regulatory Focus (E. Tory Higgins)
• People regulate goal-directed behaviors in two
distinct ways serving two distinct needs:
– Promotion focus: concerned with advancement,
growth, accomplishments; “going for the gold.”
Correlates with extraversion & behavioral
activation.
– Prevention focus: motivated to prevent failure;
correlates with neuroticism and harm avoidance
and negatively with impulsivity.
Mischel’s Cognitive-Affective Personality System
• Mischel believed in behavioral specificity—behavior is more
strongly influenced by the situation than by personality.
• Personality – not a collection of traits but an organization of
cognitive & affective activities that influence how we respond
to certain kinds of situations.
• Focused on processes rather than static traits.
• We use different thoughts & emotions to meet each situation.
If…then propositions
• If situation A, then person does X, but if
situation B, person does Y.
• If-Then situation-behavior patterns are stable
and highly specific.
• Form behavioral signatures—personality
consistencies found in distinctive If-then
patterns of variability across situations.