Social Learning and Clinical Psychology Julian B. Rotter

2017 Reprint of 1954 First. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. The main idea in Julian Rotter’s social learning theory is that personality represents an interaction of the individual with his or her environment. One cannot speak of a personality, internal to the individual, that is independent of the environment. Neither can one focus on behavior as being an automatic response to an objective set of environmental stimuli. Rather, to understand behavior, one must take both the individual (i.e., his or her life history of learning and experiences) and the environment (i.e., those stimuli that the person is aware of and responding to) into account. Rotter describes personality as a relatively stable set of potentials for responding to situations in a particular way. Julian B. Rotter has been cited as one of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century and is still much cited.