I was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. Starting from first grade until the end of high school, I have attended the same international school in Istanbul. Therefore, my classmates and I have a twelve year of shared history together. We grew up together and our families have built very strong friendship bonds. When we all graduated high school and scattered all over the world for college, some of our friends started to change and develop new and different habits. Some of them started drinking and some of them started smoking, while a fewer number of our friends started partying a little “harder”.
When we graduated college and moved back to Istanbul as adults, all but one of my friends were able to quit their newly developed bad habits, one way or another. One of my best friends, Dennis, could have easily been labeled as an addict when he moved back home. He was jobless, made new friends we have never met before, stopped working out and eating healthy completely. He slept all throughout the day while we were at work, and stayed up all night doing drugs. Sometimes he would not sleep for 2 or 3 days straight because of binge drug taking.
As we are a very close group of friends, we have tried many things to help him cope with his problem. We tried many interventions.We tried talking to his cousin. A group of 5 friends even went to a rehabilitation center with him for a week to understand him better. Nothing truly worked! As soon as he was left alone, he was craving drugs, saying he doesn’t like it when the reality sets in. Failing after a couple of tries, we have decided to try something new and more effective.
We rented apartments in the same complex, making sure at least one person was always present with Dennis. We helped him look for jobs and get ready for interviews, which resulted in him getting a job in a field he really wanted to work; sports entertainment. One of our friends was a chef, so she cooked us meals every night and breakfast on weekends, implicitly making Dennis start eating healthy. We played basketball games two nights a week, making sure we were keeping him active and that he was spending energy. After a couple of weeks, he started acting like one of us. He told me that he enjoys how I eat breakfast every morning before work, so we started eating together. He told one of our other friends that he likes how he dresses up for work, so they went shopping together. One day at a time, after being able to observe how his peers do ‘normal’, Dennis started to act like us and slowly quit his habit. Even today, after 5 years, he says that observing the same ritual over and over again made it easier to act upon.
I believe it is wrong to connect observational learning with just negative behaviors. It can also be used to influence positive behaviors. An important chunk of learning depends on us observing and modelling others; this observation and modelling starts when we are just infants. “Indeed, the research and scholarly work conducted by Bandura and colleagues set the occasion for the social cognitive perspective of learning (Bandura, 1986), which seemed to challenge the possibility that all behavior could be accounted for by respondent and operant processes alone (Fryling et al, 2011).” It is just astonishing how social psychology could be applied into our everyday lives so easily.
References
Fryling, M. J., Johnston, C., & Hayes, L. J. (2011). Understanding Observational Learning: An Interbehavioral Approach. The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 27(1), 191–203.
Tags: Clinical/Counseling, Lesson 5, psych 424
Wow you guys are really good friends. Its funny how the people you hang around can either take you to the next level or bring you down a level. What really stood out to me in your article was how you and all your friends really took charged. You changed the bad people, place and things that your had and replace them with new ones; plus you guys improved his self-esteem great job