Everything about Albert Bandura totally explained
Albert Bandura (born
December 4,
1925 in
Mundare,
Alberta,
Canada) is a
Canadian psychologist specializing in
social cognitive theory and
self-efficacy.
Education
Bandura graduated with a B.A. from the
University of British Columbia with the Bolocan Award in
psychology, and then obtained his M.A. in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1952 from the
University of Iowa. Upon graduation, he participated in a clinical internship with the Wichita Kansas Guidance Center. The following year, he accepted a teaching position at Stanford, the same position he holds today.
Academic career
Bandura joined the faculty of the Department of Psychology at
Stanford University in 1953, where he's remained to pursue his career. In 1974 the
American Psychological Association elected him to its presidency.
Research
Bandura was initially influenced by Robert Sears' work on familial antecedents of
social behavior and identificatory learning, Bandura directed his initial research to the role of social
modeling in human
motivation, thought, and action. In collaboration with Richard Walters, his first doctoral student, Bandura engaged in studies of
social learning and
aggression. Their joint efforts illustrated the critical role of
modeling in human behavior and led to a program of research into the determinants and mechanisms of
observational learning (part of which has become known in the
history of psychology as the "
Bobo doll experiment"). The program also led to Bandura's first book,
Adolescent Aggression in 1959, and to a subsequent book,
Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis in 1973.
In 1963 Bandura published his second book,
Social Learning and Personality Development. In 1974
Stanford University awarded him an endowed chair and he became David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science 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 beliefs (which the phobic individuals had in their own capabilities to alleviate their
phobia) mediated changes in behavior and in fear-arousal. He then launched a major program of research examining the influential role of self-referent thought in psychological functioning. Although 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 that self-efficacy beliefs play in human functioning.
In 1986 Bandura 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. This social cognitive 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.
In his 1997 book,
Self Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, Bandura set forth the tenets of his theory of self-efficacy and its applications to fields as diverse as life-course development, education, health,
psychopathology, athletics,
business, and international affairs.
Bandura has lectured and written on topics such as escaping
homelessness, deceleration of
population growth, transgressive behavior,
mass communication,
substance abuse, and
terrorism. He has explored the manner in which people morally disengage when they perpetrate
inhumanities, and he's traced the psychosocial tactics by which individuals and societies selectively disengage moral self-sanctions from inhumane conduct. He desires and works for a civilized life with humane standards buttressed "by safeguards built into social systems that uphold compassionate behavior and renounce cruelty".
A 2002 survey ranked Bandura as the fifth most-frequently cited psychologist of all time, behind
Sigmund Freud,
Jean Piaget,
Hans Eysenck, and
B. F. Skinner, and the most cited living one.
Further Information
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