Discussion Questions III: Skinner, Kelly, social cognition

Every one of the four questions is built around an *or*, and that construction is the instruction. Would Skinner's approach lead to a more scientific psychology, **or** would it instead fail to develop a science of important aspects of experience? Can we conduct a science of persons if there is no objective truth to discover? Does social cognitive theory explain differences in mood, **or** is this a limitation? These are not questions with settled answers; they are invitations to take a position and defend it against the alternative the question has already named for you. A graduate answer that surveys both sides evenhandedly and declines to commit reads as evasion. Decide the thesis for each question before drafting, state it in the first two sentences under the heading, and spend the rest of the page earning it.

Question two contains the trap that costs most marks on this set. Kelly is routinely read as denying that reality exists, and then the question answers itself: no objective truth, therefore no science. That is not his position. Constructive alternativism holds that events are real but are only ever available to us through the constructions we place on them, and that all present constructions are open to replacement by better ones. That is a claim about access, not about existence — and it is precisely what makes a science of persons possible rather than impossible, because it casts the person as someone forming hypotheses and testing them against events. Kelly's own instrument for eliciting constructs is the evidence that he took the measurement problem seriously. Get this distinction right and the third part of the question answers itself.

Question three turns entirely on one word: *expectancies*. Radical behaviourism explains behaviour by reinforcement history, so the environment acts on the person and the person's account of it is beside the point. Social cognitive theory inserts belief between the two — what the person expects a behaviour to produce, and whether they believe themselves capable of performing it. That is why the counter-argument to Skinner on free will is not an assertion of freedom but a demonstration that people regulate their own behaviour through goals, standards and self-evaluation. And it is why two people can react differently to the same environment: under reciprocal determinism the environment is not the same for both, because person factors and behaviour select, interpret and alter the situation each one ends up in. That reframing is also what makes the question answerable without appealing to free will, which Skinner had already argued was not an explanation of anything.

Question four is the one where the honest answer is the strong answer. Social cognitive theory has real purchase on mood variability — self-efficacy beliefs, progress against personal standards and self-regulatory failure all move affect, and the theory explains why the same setback flattens one person and mobilises another. What it handles less well is stable dispositional difference: the fact that some people are reliably upbeat across years and situations sits more naturally in a trait account, where positive and negative affectivity are dimensions of personality rather than outputs of appraisal. Saying so is not conceding defeat; the question explicitly asks whether this might be a limitation, and naming where a theory runs out is exactly the judgement the marker is looking for. The two accounts are complementary rather than rival here, and saying which phenomena belong to which is a more useful answer than defending either.

Two instructions shape the mechanics. The brief says to use and integrate the material presented in the course text, and that outside resources may enhance it but cannot replace it — so a paper built on journal articles with the textbook cited once has breached the requirement however good it is. Cite the text in every section. And *do not copy the questions in your responses*: use topic headings instead, either the suggested ones or your own, formatted to APA. That constraint has a side effect worth using, because a heading forces you to name what the section argues rather than what it responds to. One to one and a half pages per question, four to six pages in total, plus a title page and a reference page. Writing the headings first also makes the page allocation visible, which is the easiest way to keep four responses inside six pages.