So, we look and move past the psychoanalytics.
Now we're looking into the behavioral area. We could talk about B.F. Skinner, but for
the behaviors,
your personality is really just the sum total of all of your learning experiences,
all of your reinforcement experiences, all of your punishment experiences
accrue over a lifetime such that you become
pretty predictable. Right? Isn't that what personality is? It's to some degree
predictability.
Think about describing your friend, your best friend, to somebody else and you'll
start
clicking off characteristics. Right? Things that you would say are pretty stable
about them. Well, they're friendly, they're honest,
they're nice, and caring. Why do you pick it? You're going to describe it because it doesn't fluctuate,
it doesn't change.
And Freud would say, well that happens in early childhood experiences to set your
personality in stone, more or less.
Maybe you can modify it a little bit, but everybody will be neurotic.
He didn't hold out a whole lot hope for change, but for the behaviors you get the same
outcome. You get who you have as an adult, but for a different reason.
Not because of a failure to resolve some psychosexual stage of development,
because they didn't really believe in any of that. Right? They believed in behavior.
You would just have
a punishment experience, a reinforcement experience, all day every day, your entire life until you
amalgamated into the kind of person who tended to like this thing or tended not
to like that thing.
Tended to do this thing, tended not to do that thing, but being so far removed
from
every single individual experience, you just wouldn't remember all that,
and you would think you had free will and that you were making choices of your own,
but to them, you weren't. It was a deterministic set.
Just like Freud. You think you have free will
because you're a rationalizing, thinking human being, but if we look back
in both cases, what they would say is your history
on this planet, right, stamped you into being the kind of person you are,
and you don't have as much control as you think you have. In fact, they would have
said you have very little control
over yourself. We could predict you one way or the other. Problem with one
is that you couldn't predict hardly anything. You take a Freudian situation, or you take a situation, I can
give you an excellent Freudian explanation of how that came to be,
but I would be hard pressed to then predict what the person would do.
Behaviorism, if the person tends to do this over and over and over again,
I can use that as a prediction for what they might do later, but it doesn't go
deep.
And then we get the humanists and we'll get to them in a minute.
They go deep, but we get a shift from
pure behaviorism to Albert Bandura's social learning theory where he
incorporates
concepts within behaviorism. As I would advocate, don't throw the baby out with
the bathwater, right?
Don't throw away all of Freud. See what holds up. Don't throw away all the
behaviorism and see what holds up.
And what held up was that learning occurs, surely it does.
And it occurs in a social context. Cognitive is the way you think and behavior is what
you do.
And so from Bandura's point of view, our overall goal as human beings
is to develop socially appropriate relationships, that we define ourselves
as social animals
and that we have self-concepts, but that we relate them to one another.
So, I define myself certainly as an individual,
but I have all these relationships that help define me, as well.
And moving through life, it starts out with parents and siblings and peers and
neighbors and things like that. Then it goes on to be
coworkers and people you choose to have friendships with etc., etc.
Nobody's a pure hermit. Very very very very few people.
You look at Walden, right? Thoreau ...Writing?
Goes off to be a hermit? And then what does he do?
A couple years of that, he goes back to town and writes a book and sells it to people, right?
Social relationships. Being a hermit, it's not fun.
Got to have some kind of connection with other people, but
looking at your tests and what you want to know is this concept that Bandura
contributed. Now we're going internal. Now we're doing what the behaviors wouldn't
do.
We're defining internal constructs, but not in these nebulous terms that the
psychoanalytics contributed,
right, that really you couldn't evaluate all that well. You know? Measure an Oedipus complex
for me, right?,
Measure an Electra complex, right? That's a hard thing to do, but self-
efficacy
is a fairly straightforward concept which is that you have
the ability to do something. So, self-efficacy is your belief
about whether you are or are not able to do
a specific kind of thing. Now you might have a general self-efficacy. If I'm
I'm a pretty effective person. I'm pretty adaptive, or man,
life seems to hit me all the time and I don't do very well. You could have a low self-efficacy,
generally,
or a high self-efficacy, generally, but you've got this belief structure about
what you can and can't do
and as I like to quote Henry Ford, "Whether you believe you can or you believe you
can't,
you're right," because when we get into social psychology you'll see that we
create
self-fulfilling prophecies. So, the idea here is that you have a
set of beliefs about specific abilities,
to be effective or not effective. So, if you want a mnemonic,
self effectiveness. What's your belief about your effectiveness?
Right? And whether you can produce positive outcomes.
They tend to be stable over time. I have a very low
basketball self-efficacy. I can dribble a ball.
I can shoot it into the air, but I'm not going to play pro because
I'm not that good at it. I know that I could practice a lot every day and
become better and better,
but I don't believe that I'm ever going to attain pro status
at that particular activity. I can look at guitar and say, well, I'm a good
mediocre guitar player and I'm fine with that. In other words, it's not bad or
good to have high or low,
but it does predict what I'm going to do. If I think mediocre is what I am,
I'm not likely to try to work really, really hard to get better.
If believe I have the ability to do something, though, then I'm going to work hard and
persist through obstacles.
My example here will be math. A lot of people believe,
"I'm just not a math person, I can't do math."
Well, that's what I believed for the longest time. I still believe there's some truth
to that,
but I can trace it back to Mrs. Cusack
in second grade. What happened in second grade to change my own self-
efficacy, my own perception of my own ability to do mathematics?
They had this weird little thing where they split up kids into different groups.
Mrs. Lamb did reading, Mrs. Cusack did math.
I went into Mrs. Lamb's class and read and there were books in my house, that was helpful.
I had resources to use.
I had some parents that liked reading, but nobody really checked my homework.
Nobody
kept me nose to the grindstone on doing work, especially in elementary school.
And I go into Mrs. Lamb's class and she's like, "Oh, you read so well!" She gives me all this praise and
all these good feelings, right?
From a Skinner stand point, I'm getting reinforced tremendously
for reading, right? Lots of positive feedback for me to read,
which makes me more likely to read and become
better at it. Believing that I'm good at it, even if I encounter difficult words or
difficult passages or difficult topics,
I might persevere through that. But Mrs. Cusack had a different take on it.
The way that she did it was this,
she came in in a fairly punitive manner. Now, nobody checking my homework,
that happens, but I was doing my homework,
as a second-grader, and I didn't line up things. I didn't write very well.
I had my columns misaligned and all that. My paper would get dog-eared and
crumpled up,
but I did it! And I would bring it in to class and I remember this. Remember these flashbulb memories
we talked about, right?
And she would snatch my paper up and hold it in front of everybody and say, "This, class, is how you
don't do math.
This chicken scratch and crumpled up paper, this is not the way
you do mathematics."
And she held me up as an example of how somebody is no good at math.
And pretty soon I learned what? I'm no good at math.
And I stopped trying. I stopped trying until I got into 12th grade. I had
used my intelligence to avoid mathematics.
I cheated my way through some stuff. I intimidated my way through other stuff and I just
didn't show up to other things,
but given the choice of dropping out and moving out,
which is the choice I was given. When I decided that I was going to drop out my mom said, "Now,
you can move out if you drop out." And I'm like, ehh I guess I'll persist to the end because
I worked at a car wash and
it's hard to pay rent with car wash money and I knew that much. And I stayed
in,
but I needed a math credit and they put me in remedial math.
Remedial math in twelfth grade was doing three digit multiplication.
Three digit multiplication. But I didn't know the times tables well. I could kind of do them.
Given me enough time I could do three digit multiplication. It was what we
learned in third and fourth grade,
which is about when I stopped learning mathematics. So, I excelled there. I had
people cheating off of me in that class.
Which was fascinating to me because they really couldn't do three digit
multiplication.
My guess is they had similar experiences that were very punishing and told them
they were incapable of doing this work. So, time goes by, I go to community
college. What am I most afraid of?
Math classes! Man, you give me something to read, I'll read it all day
and give it back to you in as many words as you care to hear it in because I'm a
verbal person.
But math scared me and I ran into a class where a woman
just confronted the whole class and said, "Everybody comes in here says,
'I can't do math, ' That's poppycock."
I was like wow, poppycock.
I'm pretty sure I can't do it, but she said it this way,
everybody can do math. Everybody can do it because it's nothing but a game.
It's just sets of rules. If you know the rules, you can play the game.
But there's lots of rules, so you have to do it every single day.
Every single day you have to play with these rules and you can play the game.
If you do what I say and work on it every day, you can succeed in math. And I just had that
epiphany of like, here I am, a grown adult in my middle twenties, a woman telling me I could
do it if I did exactly what she says.
She doesn't know me from anybody and I did what she said and I made an A.
Which led me to question
how valid was this belief I had, right?
Because what I had been doing was believing I was incapable of doing it.
Therefore, I didn't try very hard. I certainly didn't study everyday.
I then failed tests and went, "See? Can't do it!"
But given that challenge as an adult and somebody who encouraged me,
I said, "You know what? Let's put it to the real test." She was right. Then I went into algebra.
I had to do baby math one and baby math two. That's what I call pre and pre.
Right? That's what we call developmental courses now. I had to do do both those and then
I went into college algebra. And I took two college algebra classes.
It was on a quarter system, five days a week. Took them from two different teachers.
Audited one, took a grade in the other. I was in class two times a day, in algebra.
And I did the homework for both classes, took the tests for both classes,
and I made an A. That was not easy, but I had a lot to overcome
because I did not have a foundation to do well in math. Not because I was
incapable of doing math,
but because I had never developed the foundation to do it
since second and third and fourth grade. So, belief matters.
If you see what I'm saying, this is a personality construct
that I challenged in my mid-twenties. I'm still not excellent at math. I still don't know
my times tables well.
But I know them better than I did then. And I have software that does my math for me now.
So, self-efficacy. Let's see if it matters.
Here's the study. Look at quitting smoking.
This is a thing that doesn't happen often in the real world because you can't
possibly pull this off.
Social psych experiments are really interesting. What they did in this case,
they bring people in who are interested in quitting smoking. Quitting smoking is
really, really hard.
Really hard. About five percent of people can pull it off on their own, the first
time without any assistance, whatsoever.
About ninety-plus percent can't do it the first time. So, if you've been in that
scenario or your parents or your friends have been in that scenario, that's normal.
Here, they took people in and gave them a bunch a bogus tests.
Randomly assigning them to groups. We had the people who didn't get
any treatment whatsoever. We had the other group which got treatment, which
might be set a quit date,
think about how you'd cut down. You know, you give them some tools
to help them go through the process of quitting. But in this group,
they told them that the results of the test showed that they would be extremely good
at quitting.
"The test showed that you're going to have a much better than average chance of quitting
because you've got all kinds of personality characteristics
that show us you'll be successful."
They lied to them.
And guess what that lie did? It became truth,
right? The lie became the truth.
You don't see sixty percent
quit rates anywhere, under any program.
But you don't lie to people at real programs, do you?
Where could you pull this kind of thing off at? You could pull it off maybe at a
university where you have an IRB approved study, where you can give false feedback
to people and the end of it, you have to tell the truth anyway.
Right? But here we even have a much, yeah,
about 5 percent. That's what you would expect, right? People just don't have
that success on their own because frequently they don't believe
they can quit. "I don't know. When the stress hits, I just can't do it. I don't
know if I can do it.
What if I get all jittery? What if I get all this, and they talk
themselves out of
their own inner strengths. You don't have a 100 percent success because it's still
a tough thing to do even if you believe a lot.
My guess is some people didn't believe the lie, even when told
it by what seemed to be credible people. But here it is.
Attempts to quit smoking, quitters. Looking at baseline, where's our self-
efficacy level on quitting?
Remember, self-efficacy is not about how you feel about yourself,
it depends on what your belief is about a particular thing whether it's basketball
or math or verbal skills or social skills or smoking.
The people who are most successful at quitting were the ones who believed
they were most capable of quitting.
And at the end, the people who continued to be smokers
actually lowered their belief in their ability to quit
from when they started out. And the people who relapsed, but maybe want to try
again also lowered.
But the people who succeeded did what? Confirmed their belief.
It was probably equally difficult for these people
to quit, but because these people believed they could quit,
they persevered through the obstacles until they succeeded, which then became self
confirming that they were good at that particular
aspect of their life.