The conceptual roots for social cognitive theory come from Edwin B. Holt and Harold Chapman Brown's 1931 book theorizing that all animal action is based on fulfilling the psychological needs of “feeling, emotion, and desire”. The most notable component of this theory is that it predicted a person cannot learn to imitate until they are imitated [3]
In 1941, Neal E. Miller and John Dollard presented their book with a revision of Holt’s theory called Social Learning and Imitation Theory. They argued four factors contribute to learning: drives, cues, responses, and rewards. One driver is social motivation, which includes imitativeness, the process of matching an act to an appropriate cue of where and when to perform the act. A behavior will be imitated depending on whether the model receives a positive or negative response consequences [4] Miller and Dollard argued that if one were motivated to learn a particular behavior, then that particular behavior would be learned through clear observations. By imitating these observed actions the individual observer would solidify that learned action and would be rewarded with positive reinforcement.