Albert Bandura

Albert Bandura (built-in December 4, 1925, in Mundare, Alberta, Canada) is a psychologist and the David Starr Hashemite kingdom of jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University. Over a career spanning almost vi decades, Bandura has been responsible for groundbreaking contributions to many fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory, therapy and personality psychology, and was as well influential in the transition betwixt behaviorism and cognitive psychology. He is known every bit the originator of social learning theory and the theory of self-efficacy, and is also responsible for the influential 1961 Bobo Doll experiment.

A 2002 survey ranked Bandura equally the fourth nearly-frequently cited psychologist of all time, behind B.F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Piaget, and every bit the most cited living one. Bandura is widely described every bit the greatest living psychologist, and as 1 of the virtually influential psychologists of all time. In 2008 Bandura won the Grawemeyer Laurels in Psychology.

Inquiry

Bandura was initially influenced past Robert Sears' piece of work on familial antecedents of social behavior and identificatory learning, Bandura directed his initial enquiry to the role of social modeling in human motivation, thought, and action. In collaboration with Richard Walters, his first doctoral pupil, Bandura engaged in studies of social learning and aggression. Their joint efforts illustrated the disquisitional role of modeling in human behavior and led to a program of inquiry into the determinants and mechanisms of observational learning.

Social Learning Theory

The initial phase of Bandura's research analyzed the foundations of human learning and the propensity of children and adults to imitate behavior observed in others. (It is a common mistake, even amid psychologists, to confuse the words 'imitate' and 'model.' For case, a child patterns, but does not 'model' his beliefs after someone else; he displays or imitates new beliefs acquired by observing a model.)

Analysis of aggression

Bandura'southward research with Walters led to his outset book, Adolescent Assailment in 1959, and to a subsequent volume, Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis in 1973. During a flow dominated by behaviorism in the mold of B.F. Skinner, Bandura believed the sole behavioral modifiers of reward and punishment in classical operant conditioning were inadequate equally a framework, and that many man behaviors were learned from other humans. Bandura began to clarify means of treating disproportionately ambitious children by identifying sources of violence in their lives. Initial research in the area had begun in the 1940s nether Neal Miller and John Dollard; Bandura's connected piece of work in this line somewhen culminated in the Bobo doll experiment, and in 1977's enormously influential treatise, Social Learning Theory. Many of Bandura's innovations came from his focus on empirical investigation and reproducible investigation, which were alien to a field of psychology dominated past the theories of Freud.

The Bobo Doll experiment

In 1961 Bandura conducted a controversial experiment known every bit the Bobo doll experiment, to study patterns of behavior , at to the lowest degree in part, past social learning theory, and that similar behaviors were learned by individuals shaping their own behavior after the deportment of models. The experiment was criticized by some on ethical grounds, for training children towards assailment. Bandura's results from the Bobo Doll Experiment changed the course of modern psychology, and were widely credited for helping shift the focus in academic psychology from pure behaviorism to cerebral psychology. The experiment is amongst the most lauded and celebrated of psychological experiments.

Social cognitive theory

By the mid-1980s, Bandura'due south research had taken a more holistic bent, and his analyses tended towards giving a more comprehensive overview of human noesis in the context of social learning. The theory he expanded from social learning theory soon became known every bit social cognitive theory.

Social Foundations of Thought and Action

In 1986, Bandura published Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cerebral Theory (see commodity), in which he reconceptualized individuals as self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting, and self-regulating, in opposition to the orthodox formulation of humans as governed by external forces. Bandura advanced concepts of triadic reciprocality, which determined the connections between human behavior, environmental factors, and personal factors such as cognitive, melancholia, and biological events, and of reciprocal determinism, governing the causal relations between such factors. Bandura'southward accent on the capacity of agents to cocky-organize and self-regulate would eventually give rising to his later on work on self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy

In 1963 Bandura published Social Learning and Personality Evolution. In 1974 Stanford University awarded him an endowed chair and he became David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Scientific discipline in Psychology. In 1977, Bandura published the ambitious Social Learning Theory, a book that altered the direction psychology took in the 1980s.

In the course of investigating the processes by which modeling alleviates phobic disorders in snake-phobics, Bandura found that self-efficacy behavior (which the phobic individuals had in their own capabilities to alleviate their phobia) mediated changes in beliefs and in fear-arousal. He then launched a major program of research examining the influential role of self-referent thought in psychological performance. Although he connected to explore and write on theoretical problems relating to myriad topics, from the late 1970s he devoted much attention to exploring the part that self-efficacy beliefs play in human performance.

In 1986 Bandura published Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory (see commodity), a book in which he offered a social cognitive theory of human functioning that accords a central role to cerebral, vicarious, self-regulatory and self-reflective processes in human adaptation and modify. This 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 ecology forces or driven by inner impulses. Self-efficacy: The practise of control was published in 1997.