Showing papers on "Reciprocal determinism published in 1991"

Self-regulatory mechanisms governing the impact of social comparison on complex decision making.

Abstract: This study tested the hypothesis that different patterns of social comparison would affect performance attainments in a simulated organization through their impact on mediating self-regulatory mechanisms. Ss served as organizational decision makers under prearranged comparative feedback that they performed as well as their comparators, consistently surpassed them, achieved growing mastery, or experienced progressive decline. Progressive mastery enhanced perceived self-efficacy, efficient analytic thinking, challenging goal setting, aidful affective self-reaction, and organizational performance. Relative decline undermined these self-regulatory factors and produced a growing deterioration of organizational performance. The similar and superior socialcomparative patterns of influence had a supportive self-regulative and performance effect. Path analyses revealed that perceived self-eificacy, quality of analytic thinking, personal goal setting, and affective self-reactions operated as significant determinants of performance attainments. Many of the theories that have been proposed over the years to explain human sociocognitive functioning have relied heavily on causal models favoring one-sided determinism. In such models of unidirectional causation, behavior is depicted as being shaped and regulated either by environmental influences or by internal dispositions. In the more recent, partially bidirectional models of causation, persons and situations affect each other but their influence on behavior flows unidirectionally. Social cognitive theory explains sociocognitive functioning in terms of triadic reciprocal causation (A. Bandura, 1986). In this model of reciprocal determinism, behavior, cognitive, and other personal factors and environmental events all operate as interacting determinants that influence each other bidirectionally. In analyzing the personal determinants in this interactional causal structure, social-cognitive theory accords a central role to cognitive self-regulative processes. In this research, interactional causal structures are examined as they operate within the context of managerial decision making in a dynamic simulated environment. Each of the major interactants in the triadic causal structure--cognitive, behavioral, and environmental-~-functions as an important constituent of the transactional processes. The cognitive determinant is indexed by self-beliefs of etficacy, personal goal setting, selfevaluation, and quality of analytic thinking. The managerial choices that are executed constitute the behavioral determi

Cognitive motivation and drug use: a 9-year longitudinal study.

Abstract: The predictive precedence of expectancy constructs, operationally defined as cognitive motivations, and drug use was investigated over a 9-year period from adolescence to adulthood. Alternative predictions from three different classes of theories of expectancy-behavior relations, including expectancy theory, a Skinnerian approach, and a reciprocal determinism perspective, were evaluated. The results are most consistent with the notion based in expectancy theory that cognitive motivations are nonspurious and possibly functionally autonomous influences on the use and abuse of drugs. More limited support is found for the view that drug use leads to cognitive motivations, as postulated in other theoretical perspectives. Other findings reveal the presence of expectancy generalization processes consistent with Rotter's (1954) expectancy theory, as well as the unique status of cognitive motivations for alcohol as an independent predictor of problem drug use.