What Is Incompetent Behavior?

Albert Bandura proposed that behavior is the mediator of the effects of the environment on the person. If you have a competent behavior, you will know how to face life situations more successfully. Therefore, incompetent behavior would refer to a lack of ability to adapt to the social environment and maintain positive relationships with others.

Social competence is the result of many factors. A correct perception of relevant interpersonal stimuli must be given, flexible processing of those stimuli to produce and evaluate possible response options, of which the best would be selected, to end with the expression of the chosen one.

For Monjas (1993), “the one who has the most behaviors is not the most skillful, but the one who is most capable of perceiving and discriminating the signs of the context and choosing the appropriate combination of behaviors for that particular situation”

The concept of social competence is broader than that of social skills and is evaluative in nature. The term social competence refers to an evaluative generalization, while the term social skills refers to specific behaviors. That is, social skills are specific behaviors that together make up social behavior.

From psychology, various models have been proposed to explain incompetent behavior. Here we explain the main ones.

Incompetent behavior explained by the Behavior deficit Model

This model maintains that social incompetence is explained by the lack of appropriate behaviors. There is a lack of adequate social experiences, so that the person has not had the opportunity to learn the necessary skills. It can also be due to inadequate reinforcement, an absence of appropriate role models, or a lack of stimulation and learning opportunities.

An example that can illustrate this model is frequently identified in people who come from unstructured families and with a lack of adequate models beyond the family context. They are people who in their life history have suffered neglect, lack of schooling or abandonment.

For example, a person who cannot access a job in front of the public because he does not know what would be the appropriate behavior when a client asks, insists and even protests. He would not know how to establish limits between his rights and those of the client.

Only by repeatedly exposing yourself to a situation and enduring frustration will you be able to extract a valid and functional model of behavior. The intervention would be aimed at gradually and systematically teaching the components of each of the skills that the person lacks.

Incompetent behavior explained by the Conditioned Anxiety Model

It assumes that people possess the necessary behaviors and skills, but do not exhibit them due to anxiety conditioned to certain stimuli that shape social situations. These situations avoid them or do not respond assertively.

They do what the interlocutor wants, even without wanting to do it because they do not know how to handle the situation and to alleviate their anxiety. The therapeutic objective is to eliminate or reduce the anxiety that interferes with the emission of the appropriate responses.

Incompetent behavior explained by the erroneous discrimination model

It assumes that social failure is the consequence of the lack or misuse of perceptual and cognitive skills that produce discrimination and incorrect interpretations of social signals.

This model explains the deficits as a short circuit produced at some point in the system, so that failure can occur :

At the perceptual level by:

• A reduced level of discrimination and perception.
• Systematic errors.
• Unfounded stereotypes or abusive use of them.
• Production of causality attribution errors.
• Appearance of the halo effect (tendency for judgments about others to always follow the same direction.

At a cognitive level by:

• Failure to evaluate the translation alternatives of social signals.
• Inability to discriminate appropriate and effective actions.
• Inability to make decisions or delay in making them.
• Not acquiring adequate knowledge to make decisions.
• The tendency to make negative decisions due to low self-esteem.
• The use of negative self-instructions.

A reflection of this model is made up of those people who are often called “heavy”. An example is when someone is repeatedly looking at the clock in a hurry. Your interlocutor continues speaking without interpreting that the signals he is receiving indicate that the other wants to end the interaction.

The therapeutic objective consists of teaching subjects to perceive, discriminate and adequately translate social signals and to plan action strategies to solve problematic situations.

Incompetent behavior according to the cognitive-evaluative deficit model

It explains social failure by an inhibition of efficient responses as a consequence of the emotional states induced by the erroneous evaluation of situations, negative expectations and self-reflections.

The subject possesses the precise abilities, but does not know how to use them correctly. Emotional, cognitive and / or motor factors interfere with its execution. Among the interfering variables are: depressive thoughts, irrational beliefs, poor problem-solving ability, anxiety, negative expectations, etc.

Treatment must modify inappropriate thinking patterns.

Interactive models 

To overcome the limitations of the previous models, the interactive model arises. The individual is considered an active agent, since he seeks information, generates observations and controls his actions in order to achieve his own objectives. The most frequent problems or failures in each of the stages would be the following:

First stage. Motivation, goals and plans

• Conflicting goals.
• Lack of objectives.
• Targets are transformed due to their blocking.
• Inadequate cognitive skills for planning.

Second stage. Decoding skills

• Perceptual avoidance as a result of anxiety.
• Low level of discrimination and precision.
• Inaccurate stereotypes or abuse thereof.
• Halo effect.
• Attribution biases.

Third stage. Decision skills

• Failure to consider alternatives, to discriminate effective actions and to make decisions.

Fourth stage. Coding skills

• Lack of behavioral skills.
• Conditioned anxiety that inhibits performance.

• Cognitive distortions.
• Lack of feedback.
• False feedback.

In this model, social competence would be the end result of a chain of cognitive and behavioral processes that would begin with a correct perception of relevant interpersonal stimuli. In this way, flexible stimulus processing could produce more adaptive response options.