Cognitive-Social Approaches to Personality

All 8 Terms & Definitions

Self-efficacy (Bandura)

A person's belief in their capacity to organise and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments in a specific domain. Domain-specific (not a global trait). Predicts effort, persistence, and resilience after failure, independently of actual ability.

Four sources of self-efficacy

Enactive mastery experiences (most powerful), vicarious learning (observing similar others), verbal persuasion, and physiological/affective states. The same arousal may be interpreted as energising excitement or debilitating anxiety depending on efficacy beliefs.

Social cognitive theory (Bandura)

Personality arises from the reciprocal interaction of behaviour, cognition/affect, and environment — "triadic reciprocal determinism." Neither traits nor situations alone determine behaviour; cognitive processes mediate between environment and action.

Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS)

Mischel and Shoda's (1995) model proposing that personality consists of stable if-then situation-behaviour relationships ("personality signatures"), produced by stable cognitive-affective units (encodings, expectancies, affects, goals, competencies) that interact with situational features.

If-then personality signatures

In CAPS, the stable patterns of situation-behaviour relationships that define a person's personality (e.g., "When feeling disrespected, person A becomes aggressive; when praised, A is highly cooperative"). These cross-situational variability profiles are themselves stable and predictable.

Personal construct theory (Kelly)

Personality is the system of bipolar constructs (e.g., kind–cruel, trustworthy–unreliable) that an individual uses to anticipate and interpret events, especially social events. Each person's system is unique. Psychological disturbance arises from construct invalidation or rigidity. Assessed using the Repertory Grid technique.

Locus of control (Rotter)

A generalised expectancy about whether outcomes are controlled by one's own behaviour (internal LOC) or by luck, fate, or powerful others (external LOC). Internal LOC predicts persistence, health behaviours, academic achievement. External LOC predicts learned helplessness-like patterns.

Fixed vs growth mindset (Dweck)

Entity theory (fixed mindset): intelligence is fixed. Incremental theory (growth mindset): intelligence can be developed. Fixed mindset predicts helpless responses to failure and challenge avoidance. Growth mindset predicts mastery orientation and persistence after setbacks.