The concept of “apprentice” may seem flat and without nuances, but the truth is that it has evolved a lot over time. After all, if we get philosophical, there are no easy answers to any question. What do we talk about when we talk about learning? Is mastering a skill or subject solely our merit? What is the nature of the learning process and what agents intervene in it?
In the West, the usual thing was consider man as the only engine of his learning process : the idea of ​​man in search of virtue (with permission from the corresponding deity). Then, behavioral psychologists arrived and revolutionized the panorama: the human being went from being solely responsible for his own personal development to becoming a piece of meat slave to external pressures and conditioning processes.
In a few years he had gone from believing in a naive free will to supporting a fierce determinism. Between these two opposite poles, a Canadian psychologist appeared who would speak of learning in more moderate terms: Albert Bandura, the thinking mind behind the modern Social Learning Theory (TAS).
Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory: interaction and learning
Just as Lev Vygotsky did, Albert Bandura also focuses the focus of his study on learning processes on the interaction between the learner and the environment. And, more specifically, between the learner and the social environment. While behavioral psychologists explained the acquisition of new skills and knowledge through a gradual approach based on several trials with reinforcement, Bandura attempted to explain why subjects who learn from each other can see how their level of knowledge gives a qualitative leap important in one go, without the need for many trials. The key is found in the word “social” that is included in the TAS.
The behaviorists, says Bandura, they underestimate the social dimension of behavior, reducing it to a scheme according to which one person influences another and triggers association mechanisms in the second. That process is not interaction, but rather a sending of information packets from one organism to another. For this reason, the Social Learning Theory proposed by Bandura includes the behavioral factor and the cognitive factor, two components without which social relationships cannot be understood.
Learning and reinforcement
On the one hand, Bandura admits that when we learn we are linked to certain processes of conditioning and positive or negative reinforcement. Likewise, he recognizes that our behavior cannot be understood if we do not take into consideration the aspects of our environment that are influencing us as external pressures, as behaviorists would say.
Atmosphere
Certainly, for a society to exist, no matter how small it may be, there has to be a context , a space in which all its members exist. In turn, that space conditions us to a greater or lesser degree due to the simple fact that we are inserted in it.
It is difficult to disagree with this: it is impossible to imagine a soccer player learning to play on his own, in a great vacuum. The player will refine his technique by not only seeing what is the best way to score goals, but also by reading the reactions of his teammates, the referee and even the public. In fact, he most likely would not have even begun to be interested in this sport if a certain social pressure had not pushed him to do so. Many times it is others who set part of our learning objectives.
However, Bandura reminds us, we must also take into account the other side of the coin of Social Learning Theory: the cognitive factor The apprentice is not a passive subject who dispassionately attends the ceremony of his learning, but actively participates in the process and even expects things from this stage of training: he has expectations. In an interpersonal learning context we are able to foresee the novel results of our actions (rightly or wrongly), and therefore we are not totally dependent on conditioning, which is based on repetition. That is to say: we are capable of transforming our experiences into original acts in anticipation of a future situation that has never occurred before.
Thanks to psychological processes that behaviorists have not bothered to study, we use our continuous input of data of all types to make a qualitative leap forward and imagine future situations that have not yet occurred.
Vicarious learning
The pinnacle of the social aspect is the vicarious learning highlighted by Bandura, in which an organism is capable of extracting lessons from observing what another does. Thus, we are capable of learning by doing something that is difficult to measure in a laboratory: the observation (and attention) with which we follow someone’s adventures. Do you remember the controversies that periodically break out about whether or not it is appropriate for boys and girls to watch certain movies or television series? They are not an isolated case: many adults find it tempting to participate in Reality shows when weighing the pros and cons of what happens to the contestants of the last edition.
Note: a mnemonic trick to remember the vicarious learning that Bandura talks about is to focus on the snakes or “projections” that come out of the eyes of the man in the Vicarious video clip, in which many eyes and many strange things also appear.
A middle ground
Ultimately, Bandura uses his model of Social Learning Theory to remind us that, as learners in continuous formation, our private and unpredictable psychological processes are important. However, although they are secrets and belong only to us, these psychological processes have an origin that is, in part, social. It is precisely thanks to our ability to see ourselves in the behavior of others that we can decide what works and what doesn’t work
Furthermore, these elements of learning serve to build the personality of each individual:
We are capable of predicting things based on what happens to others, in the same way that living in a social environment makes us consider certain learning objectives and not others.
As for our role as learners, it is clear: we are neither self-sufficient gods nor automatons
