Reciprocal Determinism

This is part of a song by Clay Walker called Chain of Love.
This is only some of the lyrics because I could not get the whole song off the internet. This is enough to see how it relates to our psychology class.

A guy named Joe helps a lady with a flat tire who is on the side of the road.

Joe said u don’t owe me a thing I have been there to someone once helped me out just the way I am helping you and if you really want to pay me back here is what you do …don’t let the chain of love end with you.

She stops at a café for food and the waitress went to get change from a 100 dollar bill. The lady left the café and left a note saying …..u don’t owe me a thing I have been there to someone once helped me out just the way I am helping you and if you really want to pay me back here is what you do don’t let the chain of love end with you

That night the waitress went to bed after work and thought about the money and note and as her husband laid asleep she said, whispering, “everything will be alright. I love you joe.”



In chapter 11 we talked about personality and how there are four main approaches to personality. One approach is the social-cognitive approach. The social-cognitive approach looks at personality as the set of behaviors that people acquire through learning and then display in particular situations. Under the social-cognitive approach is Bandura and reciprocal determinism. The reciprocal determinism is pretty much when something good happens to you, in turn you will do good for someone else. This song is a perfect example because something good happened to the lady and in turn she was good to the waitress and left her a really nice tip. Had Joe never stopped and helped the lady with her tire she probably would have been so frustrated by time she got to eat that she would have never considered leaving a nice tip, because no one was nice to her earlier.