Reciprocal Determinism

Theoretical Significance

Reciprocal determinism represented a significant departure from the long-standing debate in psychology over whether the person or the situation is most responsible for behavior. This new perspective argues that a person's behavior is based on his or her evaluation of the situation, and it added person variables and cognition to the factors that must be understood in order to have a full grasp of psychological phenomena. As such, this perspective influenced the way in which behavior is conceived, particularly within the realm of social psychology and social learning. It emphasizes the importance of person factors, such as cognition, in understanding the impact of the external environment on individuals as well as the ways in which personal factors affect the environment.

Specifically, this view discussed five different cognitive social learning person variables that affect an individual's evaluating and interpretation processes:

• 1.
  Competency and self-efficacy. Competencies include intellectual abilities, social and physical skills, and other abilities. Self-efficacy refers to the confidence an individual has in his or her ability to take action and persist in action. These variables address the question, “What can you do?”
• 2.
  Encoding strategies and personal constructs. People differ in the way they selectively attend to information, encode, or mentally represent events, and group information into meaningful categories. The same event may be perceived by one person as threatening, but by another person as challenging. [Page 843]These variables address the question, “How do you see the situation?”
• 3.
  Expectancies. Expectations about the consequences of different behaviors guide an individual's choice of behavior. Before people engage in an action, they consider their beliefs about the likely results of that action. For instance, if you cheat on an exam and get caught, what do you expect the consequences to be? These variables address the question, “What will happen?”
• 4.
  Subjective values. Individuals who have similar expectancies may choose to behave differently because they assign different values to the outcomes. Two people may expect that donating money to charity will impress their peers; however, this outcome may be more important to one person than another, thereby affecting their choice of behavior. These variables address the question, “What is it worth?”
• 5.
  Self-regulatory systems and plans. People differ in the standards and rules they adopt for regulating their behavior (including self-imposed rewards for success or punishments for failure), as well as their ability to make realistic plans for reaching a goal. These variables address the question, “How can you achieve it?”

These person variables mediate people's interaction with the outside world. People's perceptions of their environment determine their actions, and the ways their social environment responds to them provides feedback that in turn affects these person variables. The reciprocal dynamics of this perspective recognize the degree to which various circumstances affect individuals, the way in which individuals interpret these circumstances, and the actions of the individuals themselves and others around them that serve to further change and define the situation.

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