ABSTRACT
The social learning approach to personality has derived its main impetus from the ‘behavioural’ movement in psychology and partly from a dissatisfaction with other, particularly trait, approaches. There is no single ‘behavioural’ position in modern psychology, the approach embracing widely disparate views. Some behaviourists maintain that the main source of behaviour lies in the environment, and not within the person. Factors such as genetic influences or dispositions from within the person are not neglected, but they are judged to be of minor importance. Attempts to account for human behaviour by reference to person variables have been found wanting. Bowers has recently reviewed eleven studies that he was able to find which allow one to partition the controlling variables over behaviour into person, situation and interaction variables. Conventional notions of personality traits have failed to provide us with an adequate account of person variables.
