Contact Comfort and The Social Learning theory

After reading chapter 2, I found a few things that were very enlightening as well as interesting. The first being the whole concept of contact comfort and Harlow’s experiment. I assumed and would have guessed that the monkeys in his experiment would have clung to the food source, not something soft and warm. The results of his experiment did not support behaviorism or the psychoanalytic theory. I also found the social learning theory to be interesting. I think everyone can recall a time when they saw a friend or family member get burned, shocked, or show pain from something that had happened to the person and knew that they did not want to experience the same pain. It is basically learning from other people’s mistakes and achievements, without experiencing it for yourself . I have experienced this many times in the past and still do in the present. When I was about 5 years old my sister, (who would have been 8 or 9) out of curiosity reached up on the ironing board and touched the iron and burned herself. The way she screamed and cried, left me without an ounce of curiosity as to what the iron felt like, and I completely left it alone. I believe this is a good example of the social learning theory.