Personality Theories

p Social-cognitive theories arose in an attempt to retain behaviorism 's empirical rigor and some of its basic principles whilst trying to expand beyond what behaviorism could explain and predict . Three important aspects that behaviorism ignores are motivation , emotion and cognition (Phares , 1991 ,

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Furthermore , it came to be realized that so many of the things that reinforce our behavior are not related to physical needs but to psychological needs . Social reinforces such as acceptance , hugs approval , interest , praise , attention etc are extremely important in making people continue to perform a

particular behavior . In this sense the perspective became very socially oriented

People also often reward themselves for good behavior ' with a new CD or even just internal praise or potentially you punish yourself with no new CD or self-blame . In this way , this perspective sees internal states of being of real importance in the learning process (Weiner , 1986 ,

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Social-cognitive theorists claim that they way that people think , plan perceive and believe is an important part of learning . They also point out that many experiments are carried out on animals and that therefore the laws of learning they discover , whilst having some relevance to humans , are not complete or complex enough to account for more complex human behavior and learning (compare with the behavioral perspective Social-cognitive theorists also claim that behaviorism ignores the social dimensions of learning , treating us as though we are individual animals . In humans , however , many reinforcements are social in nature In behaviorist experiments , the animal cannot choose its environment and the environment doesn 't changes as a result of the animal 's presence - as it does with humans . Thus , the difference between the behavioral and social-cognitive perspectives of personality is obvious (Ryckman , 2000 br

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Another elaboration concerns self reinforcement - we reward and punish...