Social Cognitive Theory (SCT)

How do you go about learning a new skill or hobby? Whether you watch how-to videos, attend in-person classes, or seek guidance from a helpful friend, you likely learn a lot through observation. Watching other people demonstrate what you’re trying to do is an excellent way to pick up new behaviors. 

But this form of learning is not an automatic, passive process. To learn from someone else, you have to pay attention, remember what you observed, and be motivated to reproduce the behavior. Also, you have to believe in your ability to perform the behavior and your environment must provide opportunities for practice and reinforcement. These various environmental, behavioral, and cognitive processes involved in learning make up the basic components of social cognitive theory.

Social cognitive theory was developed by psychologist Albert Bandura as an evolution of his earlier social learning theory.¹ While social learning theory posited that people learn primarily by observing others, social cognitive theory incorporated the crucial role of cognition and human agency in learning and behavior change. As such, social cognitive theory represents a comprehensive framework for understanding how people learn behavior within a social context.

Thanks to its complex representation of human functioning, social cognitive theory has been widely applied in fields such as health, education, and organizational psychology to understand and predict behavior.

One of the fundamental components of social learning theory is reciprocal determinism.² This concept describes the reciprocal interplay between environmental, behavioral, and personal cognitive factors in the process of learning and behavior change:

• Environmental Factors: Aspects of the environment that influence our behavior, such as social norms, cultural influences, and access to resources, information, and materials.
• Behavioral Factors: Aspects of an individual’s behavior that influence their environment and beliefs. These include a person’s actions, skills, competencies, and behavioral patterns.
• Personal factors: An individual’s internal factors that influence behavior, including their cognitive abilities, knowledge, attitudes, values, goals, emotional states, and self-efficacy.

Social cognitive theory suggests that these three key components continuously influence each other in a dynamic relationship, providing a more comprehensive explanation of human behavior than models suggesting behavior acquisition is a unidirectional, cause-and-effect process. For instance, our cognitive abilities influence how we interact with our environment, which in turn influences our beliefs and behaviors.

Reciprocal determinism is just one aspect of social cognitive theory. Other important constructs include self-efficacy, observational learning, reinforcements, and outcome expectancies.¹