If theories of intimate relationships were a family, social exchange theory and social learning theory would be siblings. The parent of both theories is behaviorism, and both draw heavily on principles of reinforcement and punishment. Both approaches describe partners in intimate relationships as trying to maximize their outcomes by pursuing rewards and avoiding costs. The two theories differ in how those rewards and costs are typically translated into concrete terms. Social exchange theory defines rewards and costs broadly as anything a person perceives to be positive or negative about being in a relationship, and therefore they are “aspects of perception, not action” (Gottman, 1982, p. 950; see also Newcomb & Bentler, 1981).
Social learning theory takes a more interpersonal approach and defines rewards and costs in terms of the behaviors partners exchange during their interactions with each other. One partner’s behavior in the other’s presence (e.g., expressing affection or criticism, touching or not touching, smiling or frowning) may be rewarding or punishing to the other partner, and this will lead to some rewarding or punishing response, which is responded to in turn. Social learning theory is therefore a narrower approach than social exchange theory, focusing almost entirely on what goes on between the partners.
Distress results from couples’ aversive and ineffectual responses to conflict. When conflicts arise, one or both partners may respond aversively by nagging, complaining, distancing, or becoming violent until the other gives in, creating a coercive cycle that each partner contributes to and maintains.”
—Koerner & Jacobson (1994, p. 208)
At the heart of social learning theory is the basic idea that behaviors partners exhibit during their interactions directly predict the quality of their intimate relationship, such that positive behaviors strengthen the relationship and negative behaviors do harm (e.g., Stuart, 1969; Weiss, Hops, & Patterson, 1973). The rest of social learning theory elaborates on this premise. What, specifically, are the behaviors that distinguish satisfied from unsatisfied couples? How do partners’ reactions to each other’s behaviors lead to changes in their feelings about the relationship? What are the skills that help partners in initially satisfying relationships stay satisfied over time?
This emphasis on behaviors and skills arose in response to the needs of clinical and counseling psychologists working with couples in the mid to late 1970s (e.g., Jacobson & Margolin, 1979). Therapists observed that couples often complain about the quality of their communication, about arguing too much, or about the presence of conflicts that seem to come up again and again without being resolved. Although other theories help explain why these problems exist, they offer no easy answers for how to resolve them. But an approach that focused on specific behaviors promised therapists concrete tools that could directly modify the aspects of intimate relationships unhappy couples complained about the most. It is no accident that the behavioral focus of social learning theory has been the foundation of many self-help and popular psychology books on intimate relationships. When people are suffering in their relationships, they often want recommendations for which behaviors to adopt and which ones to avoid. Those recommendations are what social learning theory offers.
Fundamental Assumptions
Social learning theory grows out of the initial assumption that daily interactions are the essence of any interpersonal relationship (Thibaut & Kelley, 1959). Why are these behaviors so central? As Kelley et al. (1983) pointed out, interaction—the sequence of action and reaction—is the way two people make contact. For instance, a wife may find her husband pleasing or distressing, but it is really his behavior she is responding to. Other factors—like a partner’s personality, values, and experiences—are important only to the extent that they affect the way partners treat and react to each other.
A second assumption of social learning theory, following directly from behavioral principles, is that partners learn from their experiences in each interaction about the quality of their relationship. When a couple has a satisfying exchange, both partners learn that they can trust each other, they can communicate effectively, and they are loved and respected. All these messages contribute to and strengthen each partner’s satisfaction with the relationship, setting the couple up for more gratifying experiences in the future. Difficult exchanges, however, can erode confidence in a relationship. By itself, a single argument may be ignored, forgotten, or explained away. But as memories of unresolved conflicts and disagreements accumulate, partners may eventually begin to doubt their ability to communicate effectively. The presence of doubt, unfortunately, sets the couple up for more negative interactions in the future. Figure 2.10 shows this cyclical relationship between behavior and relationship satisfaction.
FIGURE 2.10The cyclical relationship between behavior and relationship satisfaction, according to social learning theory.
If negative interactions are so destructive for relationships, why do couples have them? Why do partners who sincerely love each other sometimes treat each other poorly? A strictly behavioral approach assumes people act in ways that benefit themselves, and in intimate relationships, the primary source of benefits is the partner. Social learning theory suggests that partners who interact negatively must somehow be rewarding each other for those behaviors. To explain how this happens, coercion theory, an offshoot of social learning theory, describes how two people may reinforce each other’s undesirable behaviors unintentionally (Patterson & Hops, 1972). Central to coercion theory is the idea of escape conditioning, the reinforcing of behaviors that lead to ending a negative experience. Suppose, for instance, one partner wants the other to do an unpleasant chore, like taking out the trash. In this case, watching the partner sit on the couch and fail to take out the trash is a negative experience. The requesting partner asks nicely at first, and is ignored. Then the partner asks a little less nicely, but is still ignored. Finally, the partner is reduced to nagging, at which point the partner on the couch might say “Okay, okay! I’ll take out the trash already!” What has happened? When one partner has to nag before the other one agrees to a desired change (and ends the negative experience), that partner has been reinforced for nagging (Gottman, 1993; Gottman & Levenson, 1986). The problem, of course, is that even if negative behaviors are rewarded in the short term, they can be extremely destructive over the long term. The short-term benefits of escape conditioning, however, can make negative behaviors very hard to change.
The researchers who first applied social learning theory to intimate relationships during the late 1970s and early 1980s focused primarily on communication, specifically the explicit verbal and nonverbal behaviors partners exchange during discussions of marital issues (e.g., Gottman, 1979; Jacobson & Margolin, 1979; Markman & Floyd, 1980). As work in this area developed, however, they expanded their definition of behavior from an exclusive emphasis on observable behavior to one that includes partners’ cognitive and emotional reactions to each other’s behaviors as well (e.g., Baucom & Epstein, 1989; Fincham & O’Leary, 1983; Jacobson, McDonald, Follette, & Berley, 1985). Researchers gradually realized that the implications of observable behaviors depend on how each partner interprets those actions.
Figure 2.11 shows how behaviors and interpretations might accumulate to determine the overall experience of a couple’s interaction. Suppose your partner comes home from work distracted and doesn’t seem interested in hearing about your day. By itself, that is a negative behavior; it is certainly less rewarding than if your partner came home interested and eager to talk. Still, there are several different ways of thinking about that behavior, and some interpretations (e.g., “My partner does not care about me” or “My partner might be having an affair”) make it seem a lot worse than others (e.g., “My partner must be experiencing a lot of stress at work”). Later versions of social learning theory acknowledged that initially satisfying relationships may encounter problems not only when partners exchange negative behaviors, but also when partners begin to perceive and interpret each other’s behaviors negatively. In both cases, however, the end result is the same: Partners learn from their experiences of each interaction about the quality of their relationship.
FIGURE 2.11The chain of an initial dyadic interaction. Later versions of social learning theory focused on perceptions and interpretations.
How Social Learning Theory Guides Research
The development of social learning theory had a major impact on how research on intimate relationships was conducted. Early researchers relied exclusively on responses from surveys and questionnaires (e.g., Burgess, Wallin, & Shultz, 1954). The sole source of information on how intimate relationships developed was the partners themselves. These data were adequate for studying perceptions of relationships, but researchers realized early on that “studying what people say about themselves is no substitute for studying how they behave” (Raush, Barry, Hertel, & Swain, 1974, p. 5). In fact, a great deal of early research on how couples behave confirmed that, in general, partners were poor reporters of their own interactions, frequently disagreeing about even recent behaviors occurring within the last 24 hours (Christensen & Nies, 1980; Jacobson & Moore, 1981). To identify what was really going on, researchers informed by social learning theory looked to observational studies (e.g., Gottman, 1979). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, researchers for the first time began to record couples talking to each other. Doing so allowed them to describe what partners were actually doing, independent of the partners’ own interpretations. After nearly 40 years of this type of research, methods for observing interactions have become increasingly sophisticated, incorporating detailed analyses of behavioral sequences (e.g., Feinberg, Xia, Fosco, Heyman, & Chow, 2017) and physiological measures (e.g., Reed, Barnard, & Butler, 2015).
An initial goal was to identify the specific behaviors associated with satisfying relationships and effective problem solving. Early studies recorded satisfied and distressed couples trying to resolve significant issues in their relationships (e.g., Margolin & Wampold, 1981). Not surprisingly, the researchers found that when talking about sources of difficulty, satisfied couples reported more positive and fewer negative behaviors than distressed couples did. Simply asking partners about their experiences probably could have revealed this much as well. However, close observation of the behaviors of the two types of couples revealed additional, less obvious distinctions between their behaviors. For example, distressed couples were not only more negative in general, but they also demonstrated a greater tendency to respond to each other’s negativity with more negativity—a behavioral pattern known as negative reciprocity. Satisfied partners, in contrast, were able to break out of negative cycles relatively quickly, accepting the occasional negative statement without necessarily firing back another negative statement. Negative reciprocity turns out to be an important predictor of unhappy relationships (Smith, Vivian, & O’Leary, 1990), even though couples are likely to be unaware they are doing it. Later studies of couple interactions expanded the focus beyond problem solving, helping researchers identify the specific behaviors and patterns that characterize effective support (e.g., Cutrona & Suhr, 1994) and intimacy (e.g., Roberts & Greenberg, 2002) as well.
Evaluating Social Learning Theory
Social learning theory has been a powerful lens through which to explore intimate relationships, for several reasons. First, by emphasizing the ongoing dynamics between partners, social learning theory adopts the couple (the dyad) as the basic unit of analysis. Other theories, even though they are applied to couples, generally focus on qualities and perceptions of the individual partners. Second, the theory offers a perspective on change in intimate relationships that other theories lack. While every theory acknowledges that partners’ mutual feelings may change or remain stable over time, only social learning theory proposes a way change may come about—through the repeated experience of unsatisfying interactions and the gradual accumulation of unresolved conflicts. Third, to record these interactions, researchers have been inspired to develop new methods for observing and describing couples. These methods have influenced areas of social science beyond the study of relationships, including education (e.g., Stoolmiller, Eddy, & Reid, 2000), organizational behavior (e.g., Adair, Weingart, & Brett, 2007), and even primatology (e.g., Bard, 1992).
These unique features of social learning theory may account for its lasting popular appeal, and it may have influenced public opinion about intimate relationships more than any of the other theories discussed so far. Outside of academic circles, it’s rare to hear people talk about their evolved psychological mechanisms, their attachment styles, or their comparison levels. It is common, however, to hear people talk about how they and their partners communicate and the behaviors they wish their partners would change. Social learning theory is so influential that even people with no research training agree with its fundamental assumption: Understanding couple interactions is central to understanding relationships.
The strong focus on interactions is also the biggest limitation. Although several decades of observational research have resulted in a wealth of details about how couples interact, the theory leaves important questions about how partner interactions fit into the broader context of intimate relationships unanswered. For example, why are some couples more effective at communicating than others? Communication problems are probably the result of larger issues, but social learning theory provides no direction for determining what they might be. While pointing out that communication skills should directly affect feelings about the relationship, social learning theory is silent about the origins of those skills and why they might vary across couples. For therapists interested in helping couples maintain their relationships over the long term, this can be a frustrating oversight. As one researcher put it, for developing therapies and interventions, “a conceptualization of ‘the husband is unhappy because he doesn’t communicate well’ is about as useful a conceptualization as ‘the patient died because his heart stopped beating’” (Heyman, 2001, p. 6).
Another limitation of social learning theory is its inability to explain certain common patterns of relationship development. As noted earlier, the theory explains how relationships may change, yet it accounts for changes in only one direction. Happy couples are expected to treat each other well, maintaining their initial satisfaction, and less happy couples to treat each other more poorly, leading to gradually deteriorating satisfaction. But what about couples who go through bad patches and then get better on their own? What about couples who stay together but have dramatic ups and downs over time? Social learning theory focuses on the consequences of each interaction for subsequent interactions, but there’s no explaining how the nature of a couple’s interactions can improve and decline over time within the same relationship. While social learning theory points out that how couples behave is an important mechanism of relationship development, the links between behaviors and other factors affecting relationships have yet to be explored.
MAIN POINTS
Social learning theory proposes that people learn about their relationships from their experience of each interaction with their partners, such that positive interactions strengthen initial satisfaction, whereas negative interactions and unresolved conflicts decrease satisfaction.
By closely analyzing what partners actually do when they communicate with each other, social learning theorists explore how partners may inadvertently reinforce each other’s ineffective or punishing behaviors.
By identifying negative behaviors, researchers hope to teach couples more effective ways of communicating, thereby improving their relationships.
Social learning theory does not address the broader context of dyadic interactions—that is, where behaviors come from or how they may change naturally over time.
A theory of intimate relationships proposing that people learn about their relationships from their interactions with their partners, such that positive interactions strengthen initial satisfaction, whereas negative interactions and unresolved conflicts decrease satisfaction.
An offshoot of social learning theory, the idea that partners may unintentionally reinforce each other’s undesirable patterns by giving in only when a certain negative behavior has grown particularly intense.
An interpersonal pattern in which one person responds to the other’s negative behavior with a negative behavior of his or her own; a common experience in distressed relationships.
Social Learning Theory
If theories of intimate relationships were a family, social exchange theory and social learning theory would be siblings. The parent of both theories is behaviorism, and both draw heavily on principles of reinforcement and punishment. Both approaches describe partners in intimate relationships as trying to maximize their outcomes by pursuing rewards and avoiding costs. The two theories differ in how those rewards and costs are typically translated into concrete terms. Social exchange theory defines rewards and costs broadly as anything a person perceives to be positive or negative about being in a relationship, and therefore they are “aspects of perception, not action” (Gottman, 1982, p. 950; see also Newcomb & Bentler, 1981).
Social learning theory takes a more interpersonal approach and defines rewards and costs in terms of the behaviors partners exchange during their interactions with each other. One partner’s behavior in the other’s presence (e.g., expressing affection or criticism, touching or not touching, smiling or frowning) may be rewarding or punishing to the other partner, and this will lead to some rewarding or punishing response, which is responded to in turn. Social learning theory is therefore a narrower approach than social exchange theory, focusing almost entirely on what goes on between the partners.
—Koerner & Jacobson (1994, p. 208)
At the heart of social learning theory is the basic idea that behaviors partners exhibit during their interactions directly predict the quality of their intimate relationship, such that positive behaviors strengthen the relationship and negative behaviors do harm (e.g., Stuart, 1969; Weiss, Hops, & Patterson, 1973). The rest of social learning theory elaborates on this premise. What, specifically, are the behaviors that distinguish satisfied from unsatisfied couples? How do partners’ reactions to each other’s behaviors lead to changes in their feelings about the relationship? What are the skills that help partners in initially satisfying relationships stay satisfied over time?
This emphasis on behaviors and skills arose in response to the needs of clinical and counseling psychologists working with couples in the mid to late 1970s (e.g., Jacobson & Margolin, 1979). Therapists observed that couples often complain about the quality of their communication, about arguing too much, or about the presence of conflicts that seem to come up again and again without being resolved. Although other theories help explain why these problems exist, they offer no easy answers for how to resolve them. But an approach that focused on specific behaviors promised therapists concrete tools that could directly modify the aspects of intimate relationships unhappy couples complained about the most. It is no accident that the behavioral focus of social learning theory has been the foundation of many self-help and popular psychology books on intimate relationships. When people are suffering in their relationships, they often want recommendations for which behaviors to adopt and which ones to avoid. Those recommendations are what social learning theory offers.
Fundamental Assumptions
Social learning theory grows out of the initial assumption that daily interactions are the essence of any interpersonal relationship (Thibaut & Kelley, 1959). Why are these behaviors so central? As Kelley et al. (1983) pointed out, interaction—the sequence of action and reaction—is the way two people make contact. For instance, a wife may find her husband pleasing or distressing, but it is really his behavior she is responding to. Other factors—like a partner’s personality, values, and experiences—are important only to the extent that they affect the way partners treat and react to each other.
A second assumption of social learning theory, following directly from behavioral principles, is that partners learn from their experiences in each interaction about the quality of their relationship. When a couple has a satisfying exchange, both partners learn that they can trust each other, they can communicate effectively, and they are loved and respected. All these messages contribute to and strengthen each partner’s satisfaction with the relationship, setting the couple up for more gratifying experiences in the future. Difficult exchanges, however, can erode confidence in a relationship. By itself, a single argument may be ignored, forgotten, or explained away. But as memories of unresolved conflicts and disagreements accumulate, partners may eventually begin to doubt their ability to communicate effectively. The presence of doubt, unfortunately, sets the couple up for more negative interactions in the future. Figure 2.10 shows this cyclical relationship between behavior and relationship satisfaction.
FIGURE 2.10 The cyclical relationship between behavior and relationship satisfaction, according to social learning theory.
If negative interactions are so destructive for relationships, why do couples have them? Why do partners who sincerely love each other sometimes treat each other poorly? A strictly behavioral approach assumes people act in ways that benefit themselves, and in intimate relationships, the primary source of benefits is the partner. Social learning theory suggests that partners who interact negatively must somehow be rewarding each other for those behaviors. To explain how this happens, coercion theory, an offshoot of social learning theory, describes how two people may reinforce each other’s undesirable behaviors unintentionally (Patterson & Hops, 1972). Central to coercion theory is the idea of escape conditioning, the reinforcing of behaviors that lead to ending a negative experience. Suppose, for instance, one partner wants the other to do an unpleasant chore, like taking out the trash. In this case, watching the partner sit on the couch and fail to take out the trash is a negative experience. The requesting partner asks nicely at first, and is ignored. Then the partner asks a little less nicely, but is still ignored. Finally, the partner is reduced to nagging, at which point the partner on the couch might say “Okay, okay! I’ll take out the trash already!” What has happened? When one partner has to nag before the other one agrees to a desired change (and ends the negative experience), that partner has been reinforced for nagging (Gottman, 1993; Gottman & Levenson, 1986). The problem, of course, is that even if negative behaviors are rewarded in the short term, they can be extremely destructive over the long term. The short-term benefits of escape conditioning, however, can make negative behaviors very hard to change.
The researchers who first applied social learning theory to intimate relationships during the late 1970s and early 1980s focused primarily on communication, specifically the explicit verbal and nonverbal behaviors partners exchange during discussions of marital issues (e.g., Gottman, 1979; Jacobson & Margolin, 1979; Markman & Floyd, 1980). As work in this area developed, however, they expanded their definition of behavior from an exclusive emphasis on observable behavior to one that includes partners’ cognitive and emotional reactions to each other’s behaviors as well (e.g., Baucom & Epstein, 1989; Fincham & O’Leary, 1983; Jacobson, McDonald, Follette, & Berley, 1985). Researchers gradually realized that the implications of observable behaviors depend on how each partner interprets those actions.
Figure 2.11 shows how behaviors and interpretations might accumulate to determine the overall experience of a couple’s interaction. Suppose your partner comes home from work distracted and doesn’t seem interested in hearing about your day. By itself, that is a negative behavior; it is certainly less rewarding than if your partner came home interested and eager to talk. Still, there are several different ways of thinking about that behavior, and some interpretations (e.g., “My partner does not care about me” or “My partner might be having an affair”) make it seem a lot worse than others (e.g., “My partner must be experiencing a lot of stress at work”). Later versions of social learning theory acknowledged that initially satisfying relationships may encounter problems not only when partners exchange negative behaviors, but also when partners begin to perceive and interpret each other’s behaviors negatively. In both cases, however, the end result is the same: Partners learn from their experiences of each interaction about the quality of their relationship.
FIGURE 2.11 The chain of an initial dyadic interaction. Later versions of social learning theory focused on perceptions and interpretations.
How Social Learning Theory Guides Research
The development of social learning theory had a major impact on how research on intimate relationships was conducted. Early researchers relied exclusively on responses from surveys and questionnaires (e.g., Burgess, Wallin, & Shultz, 1954). The sole source of information on how intimate relationships developed was the partners themselves. These data were adequate for studying perceptions of relationships, but researchers realized early on that “studying what people say about themselves is no substitute for studying how they behave” (Raush, Barry, Hertel, & Swain, 1974, p. 5). In fact, a great deal of early research on how couples behave confirmed that, in general, partners were poor reporters of their own interactions, frequently disagreeing about even recent behaviors occurring within the last 24 hours (Christensen & Nies, 1980; Jacobson & Moore, 1981). To identify what was really going on, researchers informed by social learning theory looked to observational studies (e.g., Gottman, 1979). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, researchers for the first time began to record couples talking to each other. Doing so allowed them to describe what partners were actually doing, independent of the partners’ own interpretations. After nearly 40 years of this type of research, methods for observing interactions have become increasingly sophisticated, incorporating detailed analyses of behavioral sequences (e.g., Feinberg, Xia, Fosco, Heyman, & Chow, 2017) and physiological measures (e.g., Reed, Barnard, & Butler, 2015).
An initial goal was to identify the specific behaviors associated with satisfying relationships and effective problem solving. Early studies recorded satisfied and distressed couples trying to resolve significant issues in their relationships (e.g., Margolin & Wampold, 1981). Not surprisingly, the researchers found that when talking about sources of difficulty, satisfied couples reported more positive and fewer negative behaviors than distressed couples did. Simply asking partners about their experiences probably could have revealed this much as well. However, close observation of the behaviors of the two types of couples revealed additional, less obvious distinctions between their behaviors. For example, distressed couples were not only more negative in general, but they also demonstrated a greater tendency to respond to each other’s negativity with more negativity—a behavioral pattern known as negative reciprocity. Satisfied partners, in contrast, were able to break out of negative cycles relatively quickly, accepting the occasional negative statement without necessarily firing back another negative statement. Negative reciprocity turns out to be an important predictor of unhappy relationships (Smith, Vivian, & O’Leary, 1990), even though couples are likely to be unaware they are doing it. Later studies of couple interactions expanded the focus beyond problem solving, helping researchers identify the specific behaviors and patterns that characterize effective support (e.g., Cutrona & Suhr, 1994) and intimacy (e.g., Roberts & Greenberg, 2002) as well.
Evaluating Social Learning Theory
Social learning theory has been a powerful lens through which to explore intimate relationships, for several reasons. First, by emphasizing the ongoing dynamics between partners, social learning theory adopts the couple (the dyad) as the basic unit of analysis. Other theories, even though they are applied to couples, generally focus on qualities and perceptions of the individual partners. Second, the theory offers a perspective on change in intimate relationships that other theories lack. While every theory acknowledges that partners’ mutual feelings may change or remain stable over time, only social learning theory proposes a way change may come about—through the repeated experience of unsatisfying interactions and the gradual accumulation of unresolved conflicts. Third, to record these interactions, researchers have been inspired to develop new methods for observing and describing couples. These methods have influenced areas of social science beyond the study of relationships, including education (e.g., Stoolmiller, Eddy, & Reid, 2000), organizational behavior (e.g., Adair, Weingart, & Brett, 2007), and even primatology (e.g., Bard, 1992).
These unique features of social learning theory may account for its lasting popular appeal, and it may have influenced public opinion about intimate relationships more than any of the other theories discussed so far. Outside of academic circles, it’s rare to hear people talk about their evolved psychological mechanisms, their attachment styles, or their comparison levels. It is common, however, to hear people talk about how they and their partners communicate and the behaviors they wish their partners would change. Social learning theory is so influential that even people with no research training agree with its fundamental assumption: Understanding couple interactions is central to understanding relationships.
The strong focus on interactions is also the biggest limitation. Although several decades of observational research have resulted in a wealth of details about how couples interact, the theory leaves important questions about how partner interactions fit into the broader context of intimate relationships unanswered. For example, why are some couples more effective at communicating than others? Communication problems are probably the result of larger issues, but social learning theory provides no direction for determining what they might be. While pointing out that communication skills should directly affect feelings about the relationship, social learning theory is silent about the origins of those skills and why they might vary across couples. For therapists interested in helping couples maintain their relationships over the long term, this can be a frustrating oversight. As one researcher put it, for developing therapies and interventions, “a conceptualization of ‘the husband is unhappy because he doesn’t communicate well’ is about as useful a conceptualization as ‘the patient died because his heart stopped beating’” (Heyman, 2001, p. 6).
Another limitation of social learning theory is its inability to explain certain common patterns of relationship development. As noted earlier, the theory explains how relationships may change, yet it accounts for changes in only one direction. Happy couples are expected to treat each other well, maintaining their initial satisfaction, and less happy couples to treat each other more poorly, leading to gradually deteriorating satisfaction. But what about couples who go through bad patches and then get better on their own? What about couples who stay together but have dramatic ups and downs over time? Social learning theory focuses on the consequences of each interaction for subsequent interactions, but there’s no explaining how the nature of a couple’s interactions can improve and decline over time within the same relationship. While social learning theory points out that how couples behave is an important mechanism of relationship development, the links between behaviors and other factors affecting relationships have yet to be explored.
MAIN POINTS