AP Psychology 3.9: Social, Cognitive, and Neurological Factors in Learning

Classical and operant conditioning both need the learner to go through something: a pairing of stimuli, or a consequence of their own behavior. Social learning theory says you can also learn by watching. You see someone act, you see what happens to them, and your own behavior changes, though nothing happened to you. Learning from a consequence someone else receives is called vicarious conditioning. A new cashier who sees a coworker praised for staying late starts staying late too. A boy who sees his sister lose her phone for lying stops lying, without ever losing his own phone.

The person you learn from is a model, and you can learn simply by copying a model's behavior. The best known demonstration is Albert Bandura's Bobo doll study. Children watched an adult hit and kick an inflatable clown doll. Later, left alone with the doll, children who had seen the aggressive adult were more likely to attack it, often with the same moves. Nobody had rewarded them for hitting anything. In a later version, children who saw the adult punished copied less than children who saw the adult rewarded, which is vicarious conditioning at work.

You see hundreds of people act every day, and you copy very few of them. One factor stands out: the more similar a model is to you, the more likely you are to learn the behavior. Similar can mean age, gender, background, interests or simply being in the same situation. A ninth grader working out how to act at a new school watches other ninth graders far more closely than the principal.

A rough way to see why: what happens to someone like you is a decent guide to what would happen to you. If a student your age gets laughed at for raising her hand, that tells you more about your own odds than watching a teacher do the same thing.

Models do not have to be in the room. Characters in shows, players in videos and people on social media all serve as models, and the same rule applies to them. This cuts both ways. A similar model can teach a helpful habit, like a peer who studies before every test, just as easily as a harmful one.

Some learning involves no model and no consequence at all. In insight learning, the solution to a problem comes without any association, consequence or model being present. You are stuck, nothing you have been taught points the way, and then you see the answer, often all at once and often after you have stopped trying.

Wolfgang Köhler described this in chimpanzees about a century ago. A chimp with bananas hung out of reach and a box in its enclosure would jump for the fruit, give up and sit, and then suddenly drag the box under the bananas and climb up, as if it had seen the whole solution in one go.

Compare that with operant learning. A rat pressing a lever gets a little better with each reinforced press, so the learning is gradual. An insight solution is closer to all or nothing: before it, you cannot solve the problem, and after it, you can, and you can do it again right away. What marks it as insight is what is absent. No reward built the solution step by step, no pairing taught it, and nobody showed how.

Sometimes you learn something and it does not show. Latent learning happens without reinforcement and is not immediately evident; it stays out of sight until there is a reason to use it.

Edward Tolman showed this with rats in a maze. He compared three groups of rats in the same maze, like the ones in the picture at the top of this page: rats fed in the goal box every day, rats never fed there, and rats fed there only after many days without food. Before their food appeared, the rats in that last group made about as many wrong turns as rats that never found food at all, and far more than rats fed there every day. Once food was placed in the goal box, they were soon running the maze about as well as the rats fed from the start. They had been learning the maze all along. They just had no reason to show it.

Tolman said the rats had formed a cognitive map, a mental picture of the layout of a place. You carry cognitive maps of your school and your neighborhood. That is why you can take a new route when a hallway is blocked: you know the layout, and nobody had to reward you for each turn.

Latent means hidden. When behavior does not change, that does not prove nothing was learned. It may only mean the learner had no reason yet to use it.