Albert Bandura

Albert Bandura (born December 4, 1925, Mundare, Alberta, Canada—died July 26, 2021, Stanford, California, U.S.) was a Canadian-born American psychologist and originator of social cognitive theory who is probably best known for his modeling study on aggression, referred to as the “Bobo doll” experiment, which demonstrated that children can learn behaviours through the observation of adults.

Early life and work

Bandura was the youngest of six children born to parents of eastern European descent. His father was from Kraków, Poland, and his mother from Ukraine; both immigrated to Canada as adolescents. After marrying, they settled in Mundare, Alberta, where Bandura’s father worked laying track for the trans-Canada railroad.

After graduating from high school in 1946, Bandura pursued a bachelor’s degree at the University of British Columbia and in 1949 graduated with the Bolocan Award in psychology, annually awarded to the outstanding student in psychology. He then did graduate work at the University of Iowa, where he received a master’s degree in psychology (1951) and a doctorate in clinical psychology (1952).

In 1953 Bandura accepted a one-year instructorship at Stanford University, where he quickly secured a professorship. In 1974 he was named the David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology, and two years later he became chairman of the psychology department. He remained at Stanford, becoming professor emeritus in 2010.

The Bobo doll experiment

In 1961 Bandura carried out his famous Bobo doll experiment, a study in which researchers physically and verbally abused a clown-faced inflatable toy in front of preschool-age children, which led the children to later mimic the behaviour of the adults by attacking the doll in the same fashion. Subsequent experiments in which children were exposed to such violence on videotape yielded similar results.

Testimony on the effects of televised violence

In the late 1960s, prompted by the media’s graphic coverage of the assassination of U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy together with increased reports of children incurring serious injuries during attempted replications of dangerous behaviours depicted in television advertisements, the potential effects of television violence on children became a growing public concern. Because of his related research, Bandura was invited to testify before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Eisenhower Commission, and several congressional committees as to the evidence that televised violence affects aggressive behaviour. His testimony played a role in the FTC’s decision to render as unacceptable portrayals of children engaging in risky activities—such as pounding one another in the head with mallets in an advertisement for headache medication—and subsequently to pass new advertising standards.

Later life and work

Bandura was the first to demonstrate (1977) that self-efficacy, the belief in one’s own capabilities, has an effect on what individuals choose to do, the amount of effort they put into doing it, and the way they feel as they are doing it. Bandura also discovered that learning occurs both through those beliefs and through social modeling—thereby originating social cognitive theory (1986), which holds that a person’s environment, cognition, and behaviour all interact to determine how that person functions, as opposed to one of those factors playing a dominant role.

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Bandura received numerous awards for his contributions to the field of psychology, including the American Psychological Association (APA) Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology (2004), the American Psychological Foundation’s Gold Medal Award for distinguished lifetime contribution to psychological science (2006), and the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology (2008; carrying a $200,000 prize) for his groundbreaking work in self-efficacy and cognitive theory. In 2016 he received the National Medal of Science. Bandura also held many organizational memberships and positions, including APA president (1974) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) fellow (1980).

Bandura was associated for many years with a variety of academic journals, including the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Applied Psychology, Media Psychology, Cognitive Therapy and Research, Behavior Research and Therapy, and Social Behavior and Personality. He also authored, coauthored, or edited a number of books, including Adolescent Aggression (1959), Principles of Behavior Modification (1969), Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis (1973), Social Learning Theory (1977), and Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves (2016). In 2002 the Review of General Psychology ranked Bandura as the fourth most eminent psychologist of the 20th century, following B.F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, and Sigmund Freud.