Classical Conditioning Vs. Social Cognitive Learning Theory

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Classical conditioning is when someone learns to respond to a certain stimuli, usually has to do with an event from the past that happened that causes a response. We have unconditioned stimulus and unconditioned responses before we experience anything, and after the event we are trained to have a conditioned stimulus and response. The stimulus can also be generalized, meaning anything similar to the original condition stimulus can work the same and trigger the conditioned response. Or discrimination of the stimulus can also occur. Discrimination is when the conditioned response occurs only when a certain stimulus is present, and does not work with any other stimuluses. For example, I was never afraid of flying until I had a rough flight with a lot of turbulence and I was very scared during the flight. Now everytime I'm near a plane or go on a plane ride I get really scared and anxious. In this …show more content…

Observational theory is when you see a behavior and copy and take action without thinking. On the other hand social cognitive theory is when you see something and you take your time and think about the behavior and then you decide whether or not to act upon it and pursue the behavior, the key difference is that thinking is involved on the social cognitive theory. There is a modeling process that is followed during the social cognitive learning theory. The first step is paying attention to the behavior of the model, the next step is retention which is just memorizing the behavior, we must be able to reproduce the behavior and lastly we have to be motivated to act out the behavior. My fear of flying could have also been learned from social-cognitive learning. For example. I could have saw multiple news reports and stories about horrible plane crashes and I thought that since this happened before it might happen again and to me therefore, I'm scared of