methods can be taught to parents, teachers, and hospital personnel, who can
carry out the therapy without the therapist present. This means that morepeople can benefit from therapy procedures at a lower cost than is possible
with most other types of psychotherapy.
The social learning theories and Bandura ’s social-cognitive theory added
cognitive variables to the behavioral approach and thereby expanded the
range of phenomena explained by this perspective. These theories have helped
to fill in the gaps many psychologists see in traditional behaviorism. Sociallearning models of personality allow us to understand thoughts, expectancies,
and values along with basic behavior conditioning principles within one theo-
retical framework. These models have also helped to bridge traditional behav-iorism with cognitive approaches to personality.
Criticisms
A persistent criticism of the behavioral/social learning approach is that it is too
narrow in its description of human personality. Although the approach
touches on several crucial aspects of human experience such as thinking, emo-tion, and levels of consciousness, many psychologists feel that it does so in a
limited way. Critics are particularly concerned with the Skinnerian brand of
behaviorism, which rejects the usefulness of examining inner feelings and intu-ition. Others criticize the behavioral/social learning approach for giving inade-
quate attention to the role of heredity. In addition, research points to some
limits on conditioning procedures. For example, it is more difficult to create afear of food in animals by pairing the food with electric shocks than by pairing
it with nausea (Garcia & Koelling, 1966; Seligman & Hager, 1972).
Another criticism, directed primarily at traditional behaviorism, is that
human beings are more complex than the laboratory animals used in behav-ioral research. As Bandura and some of the social learning theorists recognize,
people are capable of considering alternative courses of action, of weighing
the probabilities and values of different reinforcers, of looking at long-term
goals, and so forth. These critics do not deny that we often respond to stimuli
in an automatic fashion or that some of our behaviors are conditioned. But
they maintain that these are the least important and least interesting human
behaviors. An example of the difficulty in generalizing from animal data to
human behavior is seen in research on the effects of extrinsic reinforcers on
intrinsically motivated behavior. Although this remains an area of contro-
versy (Eisenberger & Cameron, 1996; Sansone & Harackiewicz, 1998), re-
searchers often find that paying people to engage in a behavior they already
enjoy results in a reduction in the frequency of the behavior. People seem to
redefine the behavior as work instead of play ( “I play the piano because
I am paid ”) and therefore lose interest unless rewarded.
Despite the success of behavior therapists in dealing with many problem
behaviors, some critics argue that these therapists sometimes distort the real
therapy issues when they reduce everything to observable behaviors. For ex-ample, a man who complains that he has no meaning in his life might be
asked to define this abstract issue in terms of measurable behaviors. A behav-
ior therapist might count the number of times the man engages in pleasantStrengths and Criticisms of the Behavioral/Social Learning Approach 371