Bandura's Model: Understanding Human Behavior and Observational Learning

What Are Humans According to Bandura?

We will talk about this in the context of Zillmann's Mood Management theory, because it helps to understand what are the basic notions of Zillmann's theory. Zillmann was based on the premise that humans are hedonists, pleasure seekers. In Zillmann's and in the whole exposure research following him, the assumption was that people are hedonists. But if we look at the reasons why they do what they do, they should be more specific than saying they are looking for a pleasant state of mind. It would not be possible to explain people's use of media from which they suffer, if you assume that people are hedonists. With Bandura it is a different story. Bandura's model is a complex picture, a mix between environment, personality, and behavior. According to Bandura, humans are:

• Self-Regulating and Self-Developing: there are standards which people have, goals they set, people monitor their own behavior and regulate them according to these goals.
• Proactive: humans not only respond to environment, they set goals, monitor themselves, pursuing goals, keeping and meeting standards; all of this put humans into position of an agency, the agency starts and comes from the individual.
• Self-Reflective: the social world created by others is influencing the individual, people are also self-examiners, they constantly control if their thoughts are valid in the system, they have ideas and thought and they observe the world in order to verify what they have been believing.

There are Four Different Ways to Verify Thoughts:

• Enactive verification: fit between one's thoughts and the result of the actions.
• Vicarious verification: people take their actions from others.
• Social verification: I compare myself to other people.
• Logical verification: does it make sense.

Four Subfunctions of Observational Learning

Attentional process: the choice of who (which behavior) to observe, there is a reason why I would choose to observe someone from all the other people.

Retentional process: the process of transforming information into rules and memorizing them.

Production process: using knowledge in action/behavior.

Motivational process: the process of choosing, if perform, the behavior.

Moral Disengagement

Violence in movies is because it is cheap to produce, not culturally.

Moral Justification: when you see violence in a movie, it is usually justified.

Exonerative Comparison: you compare your action with what happens if the action wasn't done.

Euphemistic Labeling: The language is used to make a bad behavior sound much less brutal.

This detrimental practices provoke injurious effects like: minimizing, ignoring, or misconstruing the consequences.