Albert Bandura

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. Arthur Benton was his academic adviser at 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 has 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 has 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.