Criticism Of Social Learning Theory

Criticism on Social Learning Theory

Introduction

Social learning theory is a theory related to classical and operant conditioning, which proposed by Albert Bandura in 1977. According to Albert Bandura, people are active agents in learning while they use cognition and social interaction in learning (Rogers, 2010). Albert Bandura considered that people are living in the environment, therefore, human behavior should be studied in social context rather than in laboratory (Bandura, 1977).

Values Social learning theory, on one hand, believed that human development came through the interaction between human, behavior and the external environment while people are actively interacting with their environment. On the other hand, social learning theory

That is, those results are more reasonable and believable. Also, social learning theory highly values person-in-environment, which can more comprehensively analyze human behavior with influence of social environment (Li, 2009). Besides, although the research on social learning theory focused on children, it does not ignore the roles of teachers, parents and elder family members in children’s lives. Actually, this theory encourages them to be a model and engage in children’s behavior learning process while the concepts of this theory is easy to understand. That is, even teachers, parents and other elder family members can learn or understand how to apply social learning theory, for example, using reinforcement, punishment and modeling, to affect people’e behaviors by looking at related books.

During my group, I worked as a model of being polite, how to build relationship with others, how to respect others and so on. On one hand, I reinforced group members’ appropriate behaviors by using a scaling table to note their good performance and awarding group members who perform best, that is, group members who got the highest score in each session. On the other hand, I sat norms as well as punishment with group members at the beginning of the group and used punishment to avoid inappropriate and unexpected behaviors. Since most of group members aged 8 to 13, they were easily to break promises. Therefore, punishment was essential for regulating their behaviors and reminding them of their commitment, while positive reinforcement was also significant to raise their awareness of behaviors and facilitating proper behaviors. Also, since my group members had a close relationship with me, they paied more attention to what I said and what I did. By modeling proper behaviors, my group members would have a clear model for observation and imitation. However, since I was the model in the group, the group lacked interaction between group members. It would be better if I empowered some group members to be a model in the group, which would not only increase self-awareness of the person who act as