Albert Bandura Biography

Albert Bandura is a Canadian-American psychologist who is the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University.

He has been responsible for contributions to the field of education and to several fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory, therapy and personality psychology, and was also of influence in the transition between behaviorism and cognitive psychology.

Bandura is known as the originator of social learning theory (renamed the social cognitive theory) and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy and is also responsible for the influential 1961 Bobo doll experiment. This Bobo doll experiment demonstrated the concept of observational learning.

Year 2002 survey ranked Bandura as the fourth most-frequently cited psychologist of all time, behind B. F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget and as the most cited living one. He is widely described as the greatest living psychologist and as one of the most influential psychologists of all time.

Albert Bandura Age

He was born in December 4, 1925 in Mundare, Alberta, Canada. He is aged 93 years as of 2018.

Albert Bandura Net Worth

He has a net worth of 765 million US dollars as of 2019.

Albert Bandura Photo

Albert Bandura Theory

Social learning theory
Initial phase of Bandura’s research analyzed the foundations of human learning and the willingness of children and adults to imitate behavior observed in others, in particular, aggression. Bandura found that according to Social Learning theory, models are an important source for learning new behaviors and for achieving behavioral change in institutionalized settings.

The theory posits that there are three regulatory systems that control behavior. First, the antecedent inducements greatly influence the time and response of behavior. That stimulus that occurs before the behavioral response must be appropriate in relation to social context and performers. 2nd response feedback influences also serve an important function.

It follows a response, the reinforcements, by experience or observation, will greatly impact the occurrence of the behavior in the future. 3rd the importance of cognitive functions in social learning. For example, for aggressive behavior to occur some people become easily angered by the sight or thought of individuals with whom they have had hostile encounters and this memory is acquired through the learning process.

The theory became one of the theoretical frameworks for Entertainment-Education, a method of creating socially beneficial entertainment pioneered by Miguel Sabido. He and Sabido went on to forge a close relationship and further refine the theory and practice.

Social cognitive theory
In the mid-1980s, Bandura’s research had taken a more holistic bent and his analysis tended towards giving a more comprehensive overview of human cognition in the context of social learning. Theory he expanded from social learning theory soon became known as social cognitive theory.

Social foundations of thought and action
Year 1986, Bandura published Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory, in which he re-conceptualized individuals as self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting and self-regulating, in opposition to the orthodox conception of humans as governed by external forces.

Bandura advanced concepts of triadic reciprocal causation, which determined the connections between human behavior, environmental factors and personal factors such as cognitive, affective and biological events and of reciprocal determinism, governing the causal relations between such factors. His emphasis on the capacity of agents to self-organize and self-regulate would eventually give rise to his later work on self-efficacy.

Albert Bandura Self Efficacy

The year 1963, he published Social Learning and Personality Development. Later 1974, Stanford University awarded him an endowed chair and he became David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology. The year 1977, he published Social Learning Theory, a book that altered the direction psychology took in the 1980s.

When investigating the processes by which modeling alleviates phobic disorders in snake-phobics, he found that self-efficacy beliefs (which the phobic individuals had in their own capabilities to alleviate their phobia) mediated changes in behavior and in fear-arousal. Bandura launched a major program of research examining the influential role of self-referent thought in psychological functioning.

He continued to explore and write on theoretical problems relating to myriad topics, from the late 1970s he devoted much attention to exploring the role of self-efficacy beliefs in human functioning.

Year 1986 he published Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory, a book in which he offered a social cognitive theory of human functioning that accords a central role to cognitive, vicarious, self-regulatory and self-reflective processes in human adaptation and change. The theory has its roots in an agentic perspective that views people as self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting and self-regulating, not just as reactive organisms shaped by environmental forces or driven by inner impulses. Bandura’s book, Self-efficacy: The exercise of control was published in 1997.

Albert Bandura Experiment

Bandura’s research with Walters led to his first book, Adolescent Aggression in 1959 and to a subsequent book, Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis in 1973. In a period dominated by behaviorism in the mold of B.F. Skinner, Bandura believed the sole behavioral modifiers of reward and punishment in classical and operant conditioning were inadequate as a framework and that many human behaviors were learned from other humans.

He began to analyze means of treating unduly aggressive children by identifying sources of violence in their lives. Initial research in the area had begun in the 1940s under Neal Miller and John Dollard; his continued work in this line eventually culminated in the Bobo doll experiment and in 1977’s hugely influential treatise, Social Learning Theory.

Alot of his innovations came from his focus on empirical investigation and reproducible investigation, which were alien to a field of psychology dominated by the theories of Freud. Year 1961 Bandura conducted a controversial experiment known as the Bobo doll experiment, designed to show that similar behaviors were learned by individuals shaping their own behavior after the actions of models.

His results from this experiment changed the course of modern psychology and were widely credited for helping shift the focus in academic psychology from pure behaviorism to cognitive psychology. The Bobo doll experiment emphasized how young individuals are influenced by the acts of adults. While the adults were praised for their aggressive behavior, the children were more likely to keep on hitting the doll.

He however when the adults were punished, they consequently stopped hitting the doll as well. That experiment is among the most lauded and celebrated of psychological experiments.

Albert Bandura Psychology and Education

His introduction to academic psychology came about by a fluke; as a student with little to do in the early mornings, he took a psychology course to pass the time and became enamored of the subject. He graduated in three years, in 1949, with a B.A. from the University of British Columbia, winning the Bolocan Award in psychology and then moved to the then-epicenter of theoretical psychology, the University of Iowa, from where he obtained his M.A. in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1952.

His academic adviser Arthur Benton at Iowa, giving Bandura a direct academic descent from William James, while Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence were influential collaborators. In his Iowa years, Bandura came to support a style of psychology which sought to investigate psychological phenomena through repeatable, experimental testing.

Bandura’s inclusion of such mental phenomena as imagery and representation and his concept of reciprocal determinism, which postulated a relationship of mutual influence between an agent and its environment, marked a radical departure from the dominant behaviorism of the time.

His expanded array of conceptual tools allowed for more potent modeling of such phenomena as observational learning and self-regulation and provided psychologists with a practical way in which to theorize about mental processes, in opposition to the mentalistic constructs of psychoanalysis and personology.

While a psychologist such as Bandura invokes the self construct to explain human emotion, thought and behavior, he or she is using exactly the same type of “mentalistic” constructs utilized by the psychodynamic theorists.

Albert Bandura Books

The following books have more than 5,000 citations in Google Scholar:

• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: the exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman.
• Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

His other books are

• Bandura, A., & Walters, R.H. (1959). Adolescent Aggression. Ronald Press: New York.
• Bandura, A. (1962). Social Learning through Imitation. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, NE.
• Bandura, A. and Walters, R. H.(1963). Social Learning & Personality Development. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, INC: NJ.
• Bandura, A. (1969). Principles of behavior modification. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
• Bandura, A. (1971). Psychological modeling: conflicting theories. Chicago: Aldine·Atherton.
• Bandura, A. (1973). Aggression: a social learning analysis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
• Bandura, A., & Ribes-Inesta, Emilio. (1976). Analysis of Delinquency and Aggression. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, INC: NJ.
• Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Bandura, A. (2015). Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves. New York, NY: Worth.