11.4 Learning Approaches

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe the behaviorist perspective on personality
• Describe the cognitive perspective on personality
• Describe the social cognitive perspective on personality

In contrast to the psychodynamic approaches of Freud and the neo-Freudians, which relate personality to inner (and hidden) processes, the learning approaches focus only on observable behavior. This illustrates one significant advantage of the learning approaches over psychodynamics: Because learning approaches involve observable, measurable phenomena, they can be scientifically tested.