Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective

Abstract

This article presents the basic tenets of social cognitive theory. It is founded on a causal model of triadic reciprocal causation in which personal factors in the form of cognitive, affective and biological events, behavioral patterns, and environmental events all operate as interacting determinants that influence one another bidirectionally. Within this theory, human agency is embedded in a self theory encompassing self-organizing, proactive, self-reflective and selfregulative mechanisms. Human agency can be exercised through direct personal agency; through proxy agency relying on the efforts of intermediaries; and by collective agency operating through shared beliefs of efficacy, pooled understandings, group aspirations and incentive systems, and collective action. Personal agency operates within a broad network of sociostructural influences. In these agentic transactions, people are producers as well as products of social systems. Growing transnational imbeddedness and interdependence of societies are creating new social realities in which global forces increasingly interact with national ones to shape the nature of cultural life.In its brief history, psychology has undergone wrenching paradigm shifts. In these transformations, the theorists and their followers think, argue and act agentically, but their theories about how other people function grant them little, if any, agentic capabilities. It is ironic that a science of human functioning should strip people of the very capabilities that make them unique in their power to shape their environment and their own destiny.The behaviorists gave us the input-output model linked by an obscure black box. In this view, human behavior is conditioned and regulated by environmental stimuli. This line of theorizing was eventually put out of vogue by the advent of the computer, which filled the black box with a lot of self-regulatory capabilities created by inventive thinkers. One brand of behaviorism survived with an even more stringent orthodoxy in the form of the operant model of human behavior. Operant conditioners not only stripped human beings of any agentic capabilities, but imposed strict methodological prohibitions that even natural scientists reject.Scientific advances can be achieved by two types of theories: those that simply seek to identify correlations between observable events without regard to linking mechanisms; and those that specify the mechanisms governing the relations between observable events (Bandura, 1996). Operant analysts declared that the only legitimate scientific approach is one confined to linking observables. In this extreme methodological prescription, they are

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