For this assignment, the focus was on identifying Bandura’s patterns of social modeling within social media platforms.
Since the pandemic, the world has been undergoing a drastic shift in power dynamics; the socio-cultural shift in geopolitics shaping a new order of social media. According to Bandura, some of the most intrinsic aspects of how humans cognitively process information comes through personal, behavioral, and environmental determinants (2001). Through this lens, we see how mid- and post-pandemic waves of social media activism has eventually brought us to the trend known as Chinamaxxing; the glamorization and romanticization of all things China and Chinese for the purpose of “learning to be Chinese” (Koh, 2026).
For many Chinese people, much of the deep ambivalence to the Western trend (Koh, 2026) is laced with an underlying discomfort or dismissiveness towards how modeled cultural behaviors on social media might be proliferating as an aesthetic without the personal and environmental determinants that Bandura claims to form our cognitive experiences. From John Cena’s shocking fluency with Mandarin, to the TikTok exodus into Xiaohongshu social media platform and using Mandarin to create profile descriptions, the modeled behavior has been exhibited in droves within an incredibly short period of time. At the intersection of social design which asks us to consider harm mitigation to address systemic injustice issues (Gairola, 2025) and SCT, it is imperative for social media consumers, influencers, designers and the larger public to consider how, even without fully shared environmental and personal determinants, thoughtful engagement with modeled behaviors may still open pathways toward greater awareness and coherence in one’s life (Bandura, 2001).
From a diasporic Chinese perspective, the ‘trendification’ of a culture and its by-products has a tendency to lead to commodification and flattening of cultural wealth. Its determinants yield different responses for Chinese people who live a different reality, compared to the diasporic population who must maneuver performance versus lived experience.
References
Bandura, A. (2001). Social Cognitive Theory of Mass Communication. Media Psychology, 3(3), 265-299.
Koh, E. (2026, Feb. 15). Is this a ‘very Chinese time in your life’? The trend boosting China’s soft power. Retrieved June 2, 2026 from https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz6eljqvyp1o
Gairola, R. (2025). Centering Harm in Socio-technical Systems: Connecting Design, User Experience, and Policy. Association for Computing Machinery, CSCW Companion ’25’, 11-14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715070.3747333