Albert Bandura is known as the founder of the social cognitive theory and was a Canadian-born American psychologist.Albert Bandura became famous for his modeling study on aggression, which showed that children could learn behaviors by watching adults. He is famous for his research on social cognitive theory (also known as social learning theory), the concept of self-efficacy (the premise that a person’s conviction in their potential to succeed can influence how they think, behave, and feel), and the Bobo doll experiment.Countless scientific honors and honorary degrees have been bestowed to Bandura to contribute to theoretical psychology. In addition, he was named to the Order of Canada, the nation’s highest honor for meritorious service, the National Academy of Medicine, and President Barack Obama’s National Medal of Science, the country’s most prestigious scientific award. Read on to know more about the professor from Stanford University and afterward also check Albert Camus facts and John Peter Zenger facts.The Early Life Of Albert BanduraAlbert Bandura was the sixth of six children born to parents from Eastern Europe. His father was from Krakow, Poland, and his mother was from Ukraine, and they both immigrated to Canada when they were teenagers. Bandura’s father worked on the trans-Canada railroad laying track, so they married and settled in Mundare, Alberta.Bandura’s parents helped encourage him to venture outside of their tiny village. Albert Bandura worked in the Yukon for the summer after graduating from high school to protect the Alaska Highway from sinking. Bandura’s interest in human psychopathology was later linked to his work in the northern tundra. He learned a lot and broadened his perspective on life in the Yukon, where he was exposed to a drinking and gambling culture.Hard labor combined with a series of fortunate circumstances shaped Bandura’s personal life and career path. He took an introductory psychology class at his graduate school because it was in the morning, and it fit his schedule. Bandura was attracted by the subject and received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1949, a master’s degree from the University of Iowa in 1951. He also got a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Iowa in 1952. He met Virginia ‘Ginny’ Varns of South Dakota while he was there when they occurred to cross paths on the golf course. In 1952, they tied the knot. Bandura joined the Stanford Department of Psychology in 1953 and remained a faculty member until his retirement as a Professor Emeritus in 2010.Education And Academic CareerBandura’s exposure to academic psychology, which is considered a social science, happened by chance; as a student with nothing to do in the early mornings, he attended a psychology course to kill time and became enamored with the subject.Bandura did his formal education with his B.A. from the University of British Columbia in three years, winning the Bolocan Award in psychology, and then went on to the University of Iowa, where he earned his M.A. in 1951, where he continued as a doctoral student and got his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in 1952.Bandura’s academic adviser at Iowa was Arthur Benton, providing him a clear academic lineage to William James and influential associates Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence. During his time in Iowa, Bandura became a supporter of a school of psychology that used repeatable, experimental testing to examine psychological science phenomena. His inclusion of mental phenomena like imagery and representation and his concept of reciprocal determinism, which proposed a mutual impact relationship between an agent and its environment, constituted a significant shift from the popular behavior theory and identificatory learning at the time.In contrast to the mentalistic constructs of psychoanalysis and personality psychology, Bandura’s expanded set of conceptual tools allowed for more powerful modeling of observational learning and self-regulation phenomena which also gave other influential psychologists a practical way to theorize about mental or cognitive processes.He conducted his postdoctoral internship at the Wichita Guidance Center after graduating. He got a teaching post at Stanford University in 1953 and remained there until becoming professor emeritus in 2010. In 1974 he became the president of the American Psychological Association (APA), the world’s most prominent psychological organization, 1974. Bandura later revealed that he had initially only intended for the 15 min of fame and not with an active intention of being elected as the president. He worked as a sports coach too.Research By Albert BanduraIn 1961, Bandura conducted the famous Bobo doll experiment. Researchers physically and verbally assaulted a clown-faced inflatable toy in front of preschool-aged children, prompting the toddlers to imitate the adults’ behavior by hitting the doll in the same manner.Similar findings were seen in subsequent tests in which youngsters were exposed to such aggression via videotape.The potential ill-effects of television violence on children’s impressionable minds became a growing concern for the public in the late 1960s, primarily due to the media’s graphic coverage of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination and increased reports of children suffering serious injuries while attempting to replicate dangerous behaviors depicted in television advertisements.Impressed by Bandura’s work, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and other committees asked him about the evidence of the television violence and its impact that was included in the study. His evidence influenced the FTC’s decision to declare depictions of youngsters engaging in harmful activities as unacceptable, such as striking each other in the head with mallets in a headache medication advertisement and to enact new advertising guidelines as a result.Albert Bandura speaking about his thoughts got a chance to publish a paper on agency in several good publications. Bandura’s article in the Annual Review of Psychology (Bandura, 2001) and An Agentic Perspective on Positive Psychology (Bandura, 2008) are two good places to start.In his publications, Bandura critiques early behavioristic thought, which fundamentally saw the human mind and experience. It was once considered that human functioning was like input-output systems, with external stimuli exerting their effects and resulting in a predictable reaction (like a machine that lights up whenever a particular button is pressed).Psychologists today would never consider treating the human experience in such an introductory manner. Nonetheless, the notion that persons are at the mercy of their surroundings and circumstances was once prevalent.Psychologists today understand that humans are agents of their growth, capable of adapting and self-regulating to attain their preferred future, thanks to Bandura’s work (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2003). However, many established schools of thought had to be dismantled to achieve this paradigm shift in thinking.For one thing, Bandura criticizes psychology’s largely negative and pathology-focused approach. Positive psychology’s pro-self-efficacy perspective, in which humans can exercise control over their shortcomings and dysfunction, contrasts with this ‘disease model’ approach (Bandura, 2008).Similarly, self-efficacy and agency have affected perceptions about other vital experiences, such as optimism and realism. Before Bandura’s study, psychologists did not recognize the importance of optimism, mainly when one’s odds of reaching the desired outcome were slim. Because of Bandura’s work, the ability to sustain optimism in the face of adversity is now acknowledged as critical to success in various fields.Albert Bandura On EducationLearning is an incredibly complicated process influenced by a varied range of circumstances. As most parents are probably well aware, observation may play a significant part in determining how and what children learn.As the cliché goes, children are sponges, absorbing up all they encounter daily. Albert Bandura created a social learning theory in which observation and modeling are fundamental to the vicarious learning process.Regarding educational psychology, Bandura’s theory goes beyond behavior therapy, which claims that all human behavior is taught through conditioning, and cognitive functions theories, which take personal factors like attention and memory into account. Also, behavior modification is possible.The behavioral school of psychology became a prominent force in the first half of the 20th century. All human learning, according to behaviorists, is the consequence of direct contact with the environment via processes of association and reinforcement.According to Bandura’s hypothesis, immediate support could not account for all types of learning. Children and adults, for example, frequently demonstrate learning for things with which they have no firsthand experience.Even if you’ve never handled a baseball bat before, you’d probably know what to do if someone handed you one and instructed you to hit a baseball with it since you have witnessed others performing this behavior in person or on television.His idea incorporated a social component, claiming that people learn new facts and behaviors by observing others. This sort of learning, known as observational learning, can explain a wide range of behaviors, including those that are difficult to explain using conventional learning theories.According to Bandura, external environmental reinforcement was not the only factor influencing learning and behavior. And he discovered that external reinforcement isn’t always available.Your mental state and drive play a significant impact in whether you can acquire a new behavior. He defined intrinsic reinforcement as an internal reward that includes feelings of pride, contentment, and accomplishment.This focus on interior thoughts and cognitions aids in the connection between learning theories and cognitive psychology and developmental psychology.The social learning theory has a wide range of practical applications, mainly as an academic aid to understanding the impact of aggression and violence on various scales. Researchers can better grasp the elements that may encourage youngsters to act out the aggressive behaviors they watch on television and in movies by studying media violence.Researchers can research and understand how good role models can inspire desirable behaviors and facilitate societal change using social learning analysis.The social cognitive theory uses observational learning for human motivation, self-regulating and self-reflecting.Citations Given To Albert BanduraBandura was the first to show (1977) that self-efficacy, or confidence in one’s talents, impacts what people choose to do, how much effort they put into it, and how they feel while doing it.Bandura also discovered that learning occurs through both beliefs and social modeling, leading to the development of the social cognitive theory (1986), which states that a person’s environment, human cognition, and behavior all come together to determine how that person functions, or behaves rather than one factor playing a dominant role.Bandura was a long-time contributor to journals such as the ‘Journal of Social’ and ‘Clinical Psychology’, ‘Applied Psychology’, ‘Media Psychology’, ‘Cognitive Therapy’, ‘Research’, ‘Behavior Research and Therapy’, and ‘Social Behavior and Personality’.Bandura was ranked fourth most influential psychologist of the 20th century by the Review of General Psychology in 2002, behind B.F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, and Sigmund Freud.Death Of Albert BanduraAlbert Bandura, a psychologist whose groundbreaking studies on aggression are required reading in introductory psychology courses and his work on the research on people’s beliefs in shaping their behavior, revolutionized American psychology.He was 95 years old when passed away on July 28th, 2021, at his home in Stanford, California. Carol Bansura Cowley, his daughter, said that the cause was congestive heart failure. Bandura made a significant contribution to education in various sectors, and future generations will be able to imbibe the knowledge he shared and grow better as humans.Bandura has offered theories in modern psychology such as cognitive theory, personality psychology, and therapy.Albert Bandura is the creator of two theories: social learning theory or social cognitive theory and self-efficacy theoretical construct.Without question, the psychologist will be recognized for his views, which ushered in a new era in psychology and education.Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly facts for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for Albert Bandura facts then why not take a look at Alfred Nobel facts, or Alfred Noyes facts.
Albert Bandura is known as the founder of the social cognitive theory and was a Canadian-born American psychologist.
