Vicarious reinforcement

1. You do not have to be rewarded yourself to learn that a behaviour is worth doing.
2. When you watch a model act and then watch them gain something, you learn that the act pays.
3. Vicarious means experienced second hand, so you learn from a reward that went to somebody else.
4. This is the step that turns a stored behaviour into one you expect to be worth performing.
5. The effect is strongest when you identify with the model who was rewarded.

The process step by step

1. You observe the model perform the behaviour and store a representation of how it is done.
2. You also observe the consequence, which means watching what the model gets out of it.
3. If the consequence is a gain, you form the expectation that doing the same would bring you the same.
4. That expectation is stored alongside the behaviour, so the act now carries a predicted payoff.
5. When a similar chance appears, the predicted payoff makes you more likely to reproduce the act.

Vicarious punishment

1. Watching a model get arrested, fined, excluded from school or sent to prison makes you less likely to copy them.
2. Punishment only teaches you anything if you see it, so a consequence that happens out of sight changes nothing.
3. Most offences are never detected, so what you usually see is the gain rather than the cost.
4. So in a group where offending is rarely caught, every model on show has been rewarded for it.

What counts as a reward

1. Money or goods: the most obvious gain, such as the phone, the trainers or the cash taken.
2. Status: being treated as tougher, braver or more useful by the group afterwards.
3. Approval: the laughter, the retelling of the story, the sense of belonging that follows.
4. Excitement: the buzz of the act itself, which is a reward even when nothing is taken.
5. Getting away with it: escaping any consequence is itself a reward you register.

Evidence for this step

1. Cooper and Mackie (1986) supports the wider claim that observing aggression shapes later behaviour, since the children who played the violent game chose the aggressive toy more often.
2. It is weaker evidence for vicarious reinforcement in particular, because the game contained no human character to be seen rewarded.
3. Name that gap in an evaluation, because the study supports observation more securely than it supports the reward stage.

Turning this into marks

1. When you explain the process, say whose behaviour changed and whose reward caused it as two separate points rather than one loose sentence.
2. Name the reward, such as status in the group or getting away with it, because writing that the model was rewarded does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. The mark most often lost is describing direct reinforcement instead, with the reward landing on the person who acted rather than on the model being watched.