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independent of how we behave, and positive self-regard from ourselves. When positive regard is not unconditional, conditions of worth dictate behaviors that cause us to approve or disapprove of ourselves. The difference between our real self, and what Rogers calls the ideal self, or what we think society wants, is called incongruence. To become fully-functioning (Rogers’ term for self-actualization), we must learn to accept ourselves (unconditional positive self-regard) and unite the real and ideal selves into one again.

Behavioral Theory

B. F. Skinner was an influential behavioral psychologist of the last half century. He studied biology and psychology at Harvard where he obtained a Ph.D. in psychology. As a result of his observations of and experimental studies with pigeons, rats, people, and a variety of other organisms, Skinner developed his operant conditioning theory. (See Operant Conditioning in Chapter 10.) Skinner maintained that behavior is personality. The environment shapes who we become, and who we become is determined by the contingencies of reinforcement we have experienced. If we change someone’s environment, we change his/her personality. Psychoanalysts criticize Skinner’s theory for not taking into account emotions, and cognitivists criticize it for ignoring our thinking processes.

Cognitive and Social Cognitive (Social-Learning) Theories

Both cognitive and social cognitive theories (also called social-learning theories) pay attention to the influence of our thoughts on our behavior, but the cognitive approach stresses the importance of our subjective experiences more than the social cognitive approach.

George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory

Of the primarily cognitive theories of personality, the personal-construct theory of engineer and psychologist George Kelly is the best known. He thought that, like scientists, we all try to make sense of our world by generating, testing, and revising hypotheses about our social reality, called personal constructs. We develop personal constructs, for example, when we consider how someone is similar to or different from someone else. Our personal constructs are a set of bipolar categories we use as labels to help us categorize and interpret the world. For example, our personal constructs can include happy/unhappy, energetic/inactive, selfish/generous, etc. We apply our personal constructs to all of the situations we are in, and revise them when they are not accurate. Our pattern of personal constructs determines our personality. Kelly developed a Role Construct Repertory Test to determine the constructs a person uses. People who use few constructs tend to stereotype others. People who use too many tend to have difficulty predicting other people’s behavior.

Albert Bandura, Julian Rotter, and Walter Mischel blended behavioral and cognitive perspectives into their theories of personality that stress the interaction of thinking with learning experiences in a social environment, now called social cognitive (social-learning) theories. Although he started his career as a strict behaviorist, Albert Bandura thinks that Skinner’s operant conditioning theory is inadequate to explain personality.

Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory

Bandura thinks that we learn more by observational learning than by operant conditioning. He explains behavior using his concept of reciprocal determinism, which states that the characteristics of the person, the person’s behavior, and the environment all affect one another in two-way causal relationships. The person includes personality characteristics, cognitive processes, and self-regulation skills. The person’s behavior includes the nature, frequency, and intensity of actions. The environment includes stimuli from the social or physical environment and reinforcement contingencies. For example, if we are fun-loving, we select environments that we believe will be entertaining, and because we think a particular environment will be entertaining, it may impact both how we act in that environment and how we view it.

According to Bandura,