Behavioural and Social Cognitive Theories

The behavioural and social cognitive theories emphasize continuity in development and argue that development does not occur in stages. The three versions of the behavioral approach that we will explore are Pavlov's classical conditioning, Skinner's operant conditioning, and Bandura's social cognitive theory.

Pavlov's Classical Conditioning:

In the early 1900s, the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1927) knew that dogs salivate when they taste food. He became curious when he observed that dogs also salivate to various sights and sounds before eating their food, in the early twentieth century, John Watson and Rosalie Rayner (1920) demonstrated that classical conditioning occurs in human beings. He showed an infant named Albert a white rat to see if he was afraid of it. He was not. As Albert played with the rat, a loud noise was sounded behind his head. As you might imagine, the noise caused little Albert to cry. After several pairings of the loud noise and the white rat, Albert began to cry at the sight of the rat even when the noise was not sounded. Albert had been classically conditioned to fear the rat.

Skinner's Operant Conditioning:

B. F. Skinner argued that a second type of conditioning accounts for the development of other types of behavior. According to Skinner (1938), through operant conditioning the consequences of a behavior produce changes in the probability of the behavior's occurrence. A behavior followed by a rewarding stimulus is more likely to recur, whereas a behavior followed by a punishing stimulus is less likely to re occur .

Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory:

American psychologist Albert Bandura (1925) is the leading architect of social cognitive theory. Bandura emphasizes that cognitive processes have important links with the environment behavior. His early research program focused heavily on observational learning (also called imitation or modeling), which is learning that occurs through observing what others do.

Social cognitive theorists stress that people acquire a wide range of behaviors, thoughts, and feelings through observing others' behavior and that these observations form an important part of children's development. According to his view cognitive about observational learning, is that people cognitively represent the behavior of others and then sometimes adopt this behaviour themselves.