paradigms of learning-psychological.

With the exception of Skinner, Bandura, Kelly, and a few others, learning is rather taken for granted by most personality theorists.  But I suspect it shouldn’t be.  We can postulate at least three kinds of learning: basic, social, and verbal.

Basic learning includes the behaviorist Pavlovian and Skinnerian conditioning, of course -- getting feedback from your environment. It also includes the latent learning that E. C. Tolman talked about:  We learn about our environment just by being in it!

George Kelly’s way of looking at basic learning derives from the work of Snygg and Combs, which in turn derives from the Gestalt psychologists:  We learn to differentiate one thing from another on the basis of the consequences.  Either way, behaviorist or gestalt, this kind of learning requires little in the way of consciousness.

There is also environmental learning that involves other people.  When junior does something that mom or dad does not approve of -- he may be punished in some fashion.  Likewise, he may be rewarded when he does something right for a change.  This is also usually called conditioning, but the fact that it involves others means it is also social learning, and so fraught with extra difficulties.

For example, if every time your run into a tree your head hurts, you will stop running into the tree.  On the other hand, if every time you say "shit!" your dad hits you upside the head, you may stop... or you may avoid dad, say shit under your breath, begin to hate your father and authority in general, start beating up little kids after school, and so on, until prison effectively stops the behavior.  These kind of things seldom happen with trees.

Social learning includes vicarious learning (noticing and recalling the kinds of environmental feedback and social conditioning other people get) and imitation (Bandura’s modeling).  This kind of learning is probably the most significant for the development of personality.  It can be either conscious, as when we are watching an artist to learn their technique, or unconscious, as when we grow up to be disconcertingly like our parents. And there’s verbal learning -- learning not from the environment or the behavior of others, but from words.  Culturally, this is, of course, a highly significant form of learning.  Most of the learning we do in our many many years of schooling is verbal.  And yet we don’t know that much about it at all!

One thing is certain:  The old models of the rat with his conditioned and shaped behavior, and of the computer with its programming, are not very good ones.  If you really need a simple metaphor for human learning, you are better off thinking of people - especially children - as sponges!