Bandura's Social Learning Theory emphasizes which form of learning?

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Observational learning is learning by watching others and then imitating what you observed. In Bandura's Social Learning Theory, people can acquire new behaviors without directly experiencing reinforcement themselves. The model in the environment provides a pattern to copy, and cognitive processes—attention, memory, the ability to reproduce the behavior, and motivation—determine whether the observed behavior is learned and later performed. The famous Bobo doll studies illustrate this, showing that children exposed to aggressive models were more likely to imitate that aggression, even without direct reinforcement. This approach also highlights that learning can come from watching the consequences others receive (vicarious reinforcement), not just from one’s own experiences. Classical conditioning, by contrast, involves forming associations between stimuli and automatic responses, while operant conditioning centers on learning from the consequences of one’s own actions. Innate traits refer to inborn characteristics, not learned behaviors.