Social Cognitive Theory of Mass Communication

TLDR

Social cognitive theory offers an agentic framework for understanding how symbolic communication shapes thought, affect, and action through psychosocial mechanisms and social diffusion across interconnected networks. The theory distinguishes a direct pathway that informs, enables, motivates, and guides individuals, and a socially mediated pathway that connects them to social networks and community settings that provide incentives and ongoing personalized guidance for change.

Abstract

Abstract Social cognitive theory provides an agentic conceptual framework within which to analyze the determinants and psychosocial mechanisms through which symbolic communication influences human thought, affect and action. Communications systems operate through two pathways. In the direct pathway, they promote changes by informing, enabling, motivating, and guiding participants. In the socially mediated pathway, media influences link participants to social networks and community settings that provide natural incentives and continued personalized guidance, for desired change. Social cognitive theory analyzes social diffusion of new styles of behavior in terms of the psychosocial factors governing their acquisition and adoption and the social networks through which they spread and are supported. Structural interconnectedness provides potential diffusion paths; sociocognitive factors largely determine what diffuses through those paths.