Personality theories from the perspective of social learning are primarily learning theories. At the beginning of its development, the theory of social learning attached extreme importance to the ideas of reinforcement, but modern theory has acquired a pronounced cognitive (cognitive — cognitive) character. The importance of reinforcement has been taken into account in terms that describe a thinking and knowing person who has expectations and ideas.
Socialization is a process that allows the child to take his place in society, it is the promotion of a newborn from an asocial humanoid state to life as a full-fledged member of society. How does socialization take place? All newborns are similar to each other, and after two or three years they are different children. So, say the proponents of social learning theory, these differences are the result of learning, they are not innate. There are different concepts of learning. In classical Pavlovian conditioning, subjects begin to give the same response to different stimuli. In Skinner’s operant learning, a behavioral act is formed due to the presence or absence of reinforcement of one of the many possible responses. Both of these concepts do not explain how new behavior occurs.
Departure from classical behaviorism. In the late 30s, N. Miller, J. Dollard, R. Sears, J. Whiting, and other young scientists at Yale University made an attempt to translate the most important concepts of the psychoanalytic theory of personality into the language of C. Hull’s learning theory. They outlined the main lines of research: social learning in the process of raising a child, cross-cultural analysis — the study of the upbringing and development of a child in different cultures, personality development. In 1941, N. Miller and J. Dollard introduced the term «social learning» into scientific use.
The roots of modern social learning theory can be traced back to the theorists such as Kurt Lewin and Edward Tolman. As for the social and interpersonal aspects of this theory, the work of George Herbert Mead and Harry Stack Sullivan.
Currently, Julian Rotter, Albert Bandura, and Walter Mischel are among the most influential social learning theorists. Even Hans Eysenck and Joseph Wolpe are sometimes included among social learning theorists because of the nature of their therapies stemming from the learning model.