Chapter 109. Reciprocal Determinism

1. The social-cognitive perspective on personality emphasizes the interaction between the person and the situation. Each of us has characteristic patterns of thinking and acting, but we spend our lives in a physical and social environment that interacts with our behavioral tendencies.

2. Clearly, our social environment shapes us through the processes of conditioning and observational learning. We adjust our behavior to imitate the models we admire, and we respond to the rewards and punishments delivered by the other people around us.

3. In addition, our cognitive processes (how we perceive our environment and what we think about our situation) and our personality traits (our characteristic ways of acting and reacting to situations) also influence our behavior.

4. Psychologist Albert Bandura's concept of reciprocal determinism expands the possibilities for interaction by adding the person's behavior as a separate factor that can influence the person (personal factors) and the situation (environmental factors), as well as be influenced by them. All three of these factors operate in an interlocking way, each partially determining the others.

5. Reciprocal determinism is the key to understanding the social-cognitive perspective on personality. Determinism is about causes—what factor or factors cause something to happen. In this context, reciprocal means "back-and-forth" or "going both ways."

6. For example, let’s consider what might happen if you are invited to jump off a 200-foot-high bridge with a bungee cord attached to your legs. Personal factors, such as your personality traits (willingness to take risks), interact with your past behavior (perhaps you were injured in a risky activity) to determine your likelihood of considering a bungee jump. External factors (your friends lining up to jump) interact with other personal factors (your judgment of the danger involved) to determine your actual behavior—to jump or walk away. Personal factors (your personality traits) influence your choice of friends, who in turn influence your decision to jump. At every step along the way, the influences go in both directions—as predicted by the principle of reciprocal determinism.

7. Here is another example directly related to your present situation. Your past academic success (behavior) influenced your decision (personal factor) to attend college (environmental factor), which now shapes your current behavior. To extend this example back to your high school days, your attributional style (a personal factor referring to your tendency to explain someone’s behavior as caused either by internal qualities or the external situation) determined the way you interpreted your good grades (behavior). If you attributed the high grades to your hard work rather than luck or easy exams, you had more confidence that you could succeed at the college level.