How do social-cognitive theorists explain the development of our personality and the relationship among personality, the environment, and behavior?
● Social-cognitive theorists describe how our personality and behaviors result from interactions among the ways we think, our environment, and our behaviors. To truly describe personality, we need to consider not just personality traits but also how our environment affects the ways we think, and vice versa.
● Albert Bandura and other social-cognitive theorists believe we learn by observing and modeling the behaviors of others or by having certain behaviors reinforced or rewarded.
● Martin Seligman described learned helplessness, the feeling of hopelessness we experience when our actions have no effect on the bad events happening to us.
● Social-cognitive theorists use experiments to study how different situations affect people’s attitudes and behavior.
