Page 132 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

Chapter 6

Social Cognitive

Theory of Mass

Communication

ALBERT BANDURA
Stanford University

Because of the influential role the mass media play in society, understand-
ing the psychosocial mechanisms through which symbolic communica-
tion influences human thought, affect, and action is of considerable
import. Social cognitive theory provides an agentic conceptual frame-
work within which to examine the determinants and mechanisms of such
effects. Human behavior has often been explained in terms of unidirec-
tional causation, in which behavior is shaped and controlled either by
environmental influences or by internal dispositions. Social cognitive the-
ory explains psychosocial functioning in terms of triadic reciprocal causa-
tion (Bandura, 1986). In this transactional view of self and society, per-
sonal factors in the form of cognitive, affective, and biological events;
behavioral patterns; and environmental events all operate as interacting
determinants that influence each other bidirectionally (Fig. 6.1).
Social cognitive theory is founded in an agentic perspective (Bandura,
1986, 2001a). People are self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting, and self-
regulating, not just reactive organisms shaped and shepherded by envi-
ronmental events or inner forces. Human self-development, adaptation,
and change are embedded in social systems. Therefore, personal agency
operates within a broad network of sociostructural influences. In these
agentic transactions, people are producers as well as products of social sys-
tems. Personal agency and social structure operate as codeterminants in an
integrated causal structure rather than as a disembodied duality.
Seen from the sociocognitive perspective, human nature is a vast
potentiality that can be fashioned by direct and observational experience
into a variety of forms within biological limits. To say that a major distin-
guishing mark of humans is their endowed plasticity is not to say that
they have no nature or that they come structureless (Midgley, 1978). The

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