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Rule Governed Behavior

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Learning, Lecture 20

Mark Berg

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Observational or Social Learning

  • The behavior of a model is witnessed by an observer and the observers behavior is subsequently altered
  • Bandura's Social Learning Theory
  • Bobo doll experiment

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Social Learning

  • Contagious behavior
    • Instinctive or reflexive behavior triggered by the occurrence of the same behavior in another individual
    • Yawning
    • Flock of Ducks
    • Fear
    • Laughing
    • Orienting

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Social Learning

  • Stimulus Enhancement
    • Probability of a behavior is changed because an individual's attention is drawn to a particular item or location by the behavior of another individual
    • Instinctive behaviors
      • Eating, Drinking etc.
    • Allows triggers to be noticed

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Social Learning

  • Vicarious Emotional Responses
    • Classically conditioned emotional responses that result from seeing emotions exhibited by others
  • Vicarious Conditioning
    • Fear responses
    • Higher order conditioning

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Social Learning

  • In Operant Conditioning
    • Acquisition
      • Pay Attention to model, Sensitive to observed consequences
      • Reinforcement for attending to the model
        • Pepperberg 2000, Teachers demonstrations
      • The observer must have sufficient skills to benefit from the modeling
      • Characteristics of model influence our attending to the behavior
        • Bussy 1984, People we respect and admire, known experts, people like us

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Social Learning

  • Observational behavior = performance?
    • When we observe reinforcement of the model's behavior.
      • Vicarious Reinforcement
    • When we receive reinforcement ourselves for performance of the same behavior
    • Our own history of reinforcement for performing modeled behavior

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Social Learning

  • Media Violence
    • Bandura 1963
    • 1950-00 All homes have TV (FTC)
    • TV (relatively passive)
    • Video Games (degree of interaction)
    • Eron 1972, Correlational study (10 years) of aggression & violent media
    • Johnson 2007, (17 years) amount of TV and aggression towards others

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Social Learning

  • Media Violence
    • Anderson (2000), Male video game players have a more hostile view of world than females
    • Eron (2003), Males are more aggressive after exposure to violent media than females
    • What are the implications for males and females?
    • Differential effects of desensitization?
    • Research and evidence is prevalent and compelling why isn't this reported more in the media?
    • Anderson (2001) Interlinked

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Rule-Governed Behavior

  • Rule
    • Verbal description of a contingency
    • Becomes an instruction when we include a 'should'
    • Useful for rapidly establishing appropriate patterns of behavior
    • Little or no experience needed

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Rule-Governed Behavior

  • Disadvantages
    • Sometimes less efficient
    • Can't deal with complex multi-dimensional tasks
    • Sometimes behavior based on rules is insensitive to actual changes in the environment

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Rule-Governed Behavior

  • Personal Rules (self instruction)
    • Verbal descriptions of contingencies that we present ourselves to influence our behavior
    • Say-do correspondence
    • Close match between what we say we are going to do and actually do

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Rule-Governed Behavior

  • Personal Rules
  • Work better with 'bright boundaries' (Ainslie 1986) or specifics
  • Easy vs Hard projects (Gollwitzer 1997)
  • Weight Watchers (Luszczynska 2007)

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Rule-Governed Behavior

  • Personal Rules
  • Implementation intentions (Gollwitzer 1999)
      • When where and how statements
      • Personal Process rules
      • Help establish the 'bright boundary'
    • Good Examples of Self-Control
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