CHAPTER 16

ROTTER'S EXPECTANCY- REINFORCEMENT VALUE

MODEL

Concepts and Principles

• Rotter’s basic assumptions: most of our behavior is learned and is acquired through our experiences with other people

– Emphasis on unity or interdependence of personality

• Motivation

– Much of our behavior is goal-directed

– People strive to maximize rewards and to minimize or avoid punishment

Social-Learning Concepts

• Four major concepts:

– Behavior potential: probability that a particular behavior will occur, as a function of the person’s expectancies and the perceived value of the reinforcer secured by the behavior in a given situation

– Expectancy: cognition or belief about the property of some object or event

– Reinforcement value: importance of a given reinforcer to an individual in relation to other reinforcers, if the probabilities of attaining all of them are equal

– Psychological situation: meaning of the situation as it is defined by the person

Social-Learning Concepts (cont'd.)

• Freedom of movement: individuals expectancy that his or her behaviors will generally lead to success (high freedom of movement) or failure (low freedom of movement) in a given life area

• Minimal goal: dividing point between those outcomes that produce feelings of satisfaction and those that produce dissatisfaction

Personality Development

• Personality development hinges largely on the range, diversity, and quality of the individual’s experiences with other people

• Assumption is that stimulus generalization occurs, so that other people who resemble the parents are perceived and evaluated in the same or similar ways

– Stimulus generalization: responses made in the presence of an original stimulus come to be made in the presence of other, similar stimuli

Assessment Techniques

• Five major techniques for the clinical measurement of personality:

– Interview

– Projective tests

– Controlled behavioral tests

– Behavioral observation methods

– Questionnaire

• Internal vs. external control of reinforcement: individuals belief that his or her behavior is self-determined (internal control) or determined by outside factors (external control)

Assessment Techniques (cont'd.)

• Internal/external control of reinforcement: individual’s belief that his or her behavior is self-determined (internal control) or determined by outside factors (external control)

– Locus of control of reinforcement: people’s beliefs about the location (internal/external) of controlling forces in their lives

• I/E scale: measures the individual’s belief that forces are or are not beyond his or her control

Theory's Implications for Therapy

• Psychotherapy is a learning process itself

• Maladjusted people: characterized by low freedom of movement and high need value; they learn how to avoid or defend themselves against actual or anticipated failure

• The therapist’s function is to help these people change expectancies and reinforcement values that do not work

– Must learn a set of realistic expectancies

– Must learn a set of realistic reinforcers

– Must learn to discriminate between those situations that are likely to lead to behaviors that are appropriate and those likely to lead to behaviors that are inappropriate

– Must learn to eliminate behaviors that are undesirable and to learn those that are desirable

Evaluative Comments

• Comprehensiveness: broad in scope

• Precision and testability: precise and testable

• Parsimony: quite parsimonious

• Empirical validity: strong empirical support for the I-E concept; rest of the theory remains untested

• Heuristic value: theory is stimulating to scholars in many areas, including learning theory, psychopathology, psychotherapy, personality development, and social psychology

• Applied value: strong applied value