Think back to your days in high school. How were people pressured to conform to the mainstream? What happened to people who didn't? Discuss how this could impact someone's identity and development and how Social Learning Theory explains adolescent conformity.

In his classic 1971 article, "Social Learning Theory," Albert Bandura presents an alternative to three then-prevalent approaches to understanding human behavior. From a psychodynamic perspective, human beings are largely driven by unconscious forces within themselves. From a behaviorist perspective, human beings respond to external stimuli in an attempt to attain pleasure and avoid pain. From a cognitivist perspective, human beings inwardly determine their actions with reference to their thoughts.
While Bandera finds the cognitivist approach to have its merits, he offers an alternative explanation of human behavior that avoids singling out any individualistic approach to human behavior and focuses instead on the socially determined and process-based conditions of human behavior, which emphasize "a continuous reciprocal interaction between behavior and its controlling conditions" (Bandera 1971, 2). The methodological innovation of the concept of social learning theory is that it avoids excessive reliance on inner forces, on the one hand, and on response to external forces, on the other. Social learning theory allows for a cognitivist approach while moving beyond it to acknowledge that human thinking occurs in response to the observed behavior of others and that, further, we learn how to behave mimetically, by imitating observed behavior relative to our own goals and needs, as well as the demands of social situations and positions.
Adolescent conformity is, at this point, a dated concept. Psychological and sociological accounts of human behavior, enriched by recent developments in neuroscience, have increasingly come to acknowledge that all human beings, not just adolescents, conform to some extent. Mirror neurons in our brains play a large role in prompting and enabling social mimesis. Having said that, adolescence is known to be a time of acutely stressful identity formation, and as such, the pressure to conform is prevalent.
In the context of secondary education, the social strategies of shame, ostracism, and, in extreme cases, abuse (including the form of social abuse known as "mobbing," in which groups persecute individuals) are widely employed, resulting in widespread psychic trauma, reduced social trust, and even risks to basic well-being. Specific examples may range from mild feelings of alienation arising from being left out of social gatherings to self-harm and suicide.
The importance of Social Learning Theory, as it has developed over approximately the past fifty years, is that it has given theorists and practitioners the means to understand that pathologies are never purely individual; they are always potentially social. This is to say that they are contagious—they can and likely will be learned by others. Conversely, healthy social behaviors will be the object of mimesis as well, but for obvious reasons, when we think of high school, we may tend to think of the pathological episodes that receive attention in the media (for example, school shooters' mimesis of previous school shootings). Unfortunately, social learning seems to have played a role in causing imitation in this context; here, we may wish to think about how the media facilitates this imitation by focusing on perpetrators rather than on victims.
http://www.asecib.ase.ro/mps/Bandura_SocialLearningTheory.pdf