Beyond mere behavior: Cognition and biases in the social learning theory

Abstract

Bandura (1986) describes the cognitive processes that individuals engage in before performing actions. In this essay the concepts of self regulation and self efficacy processes in the social learning theory will be particularly addressed, suggesting that t his cognitive activity may be influenced by biases. Drawing on the heuristics and biases tradition developed by Kahneman (2012), this essay identifies a series of biases prone to emerging during the processing of self regulation and self efficacy. The heur istics and biases approach gained momentum with the work of Tversky and Kahneman (1974) whose perspective on human reasoning emphasizes that systematic errors are a natural part of human thought. Based on this, it is approached that in both self regulation and self efficacy are biases and heuristics, which aids to pointing the causes of the errors that Bandura mentions on these beliefs and cognitive processes. In self regulation representativeness and confirmation biases were suggested, while in self effica cy, planification bias, reference dependence bias, outcome bias and loss aversion bias were found to be relevant. These findings allow to argue that self regulation and self efficacy do not operate as purely rational processes, but that are affected by spe cific biases, which broaden the theoretical comprehension on their functioning in real contexts.