A Sociological explaining of attitudes towards extramarital relationships by the perspective of Akers’ social learning theory

In many societies, extra-marital relationships are strongly stigmatized and have become one of the most important issues among couples. This article aimed to investigate attitudes married women toward extramarital relationships, which tries to explain this issue by social learning theory. This study was conducted using the survey method among 80 married women of Babol city which examined their attitudes toward extra-marital relationships through a self-administered questionnaire. They were selected by non-random sampling method (snowball). The findings indicate that there is a significant relationship among three variables (differential association, differential reinforcement, and imitation) from social learning theory with the attitude towards extramarital relationships and all its dimensions.The results of multiple regression analysis show that the independent variable of the reward has the most predictability on the dependent variable. In general, the results confirm the propositions related to the social learning theory and show that the attitude to extramarital relationship increases under the influence of rewards, punishments and imitation from the media is strengthened and its repeatability increases. According to social learning theory, both overt behavior and cognitive definitions related to extramarital relationship are created with two dimensions of differential reinforcement and imitation, both of which function discriminative stimuli for the behavior.