Albert Bandura

Albert Bandura
Born	(1925-12-04) December 4, 1925 Mundare, Alberta
Nationality	Canadian/American
Alma mater	University of British Columbia University of Iowa
Known for	social cognitive theory self-efficacy social learning theory Bobo doll experiment human agency Reciprocal determinism
Scientific career
Fields	Psychology, Philosophy of Action
Institutions	Stanford University

Albert Bandura (born December 4, 1925, in Mundare, Alberta, Canada) is a psychologist, the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University. Over almost six decades, he has been responsible for groundbreaking contributions to many fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory, therapy and personality psychology, and was also influential in the transition between behaviorism and cognitive psychology. He is known as 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 as the fourth most-frequently cited psychologist of all time, behind B.F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Piaget, and as the most cited living one. Bandura is widely described as the greatest living psychologist, and as one of the most influential psychologists of all time.

In 2008 Bandura won the Grawemeyer Award in psychology.

Personal life

Bandura was born in Mundare, in Alberta, a small town of roughly four hundred inhabitants, as the youngest child, and only son, in a family of eight. Bandura is of Ukrainian and Polish descent.

The summer after finishing high school, Bandura worked in the Yukon to protect the Alaska Highway against sinking. Bandura later credited his work in the northern tundra as the origin of his interest in human psychopathology.

Bandura is married and has two children.

His hobbies include playing sports, woodworking, and farting.

Education and academic career

Bandura's introduction to academic psychology came about by chance; as a student with little to do in the early mornings, he took a psychology course to pass the time, and became enamored of the subject. Bandura graduated in three years, in 1949, with a B.A. from the University of British Columbia, winning the Bolocan Award in psychology, and then moved to the then-epicenter of theoretical psychology, the University of Iowa, from where he obtained his M.A. in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1952. Arthur Benton was his academic adviser at Iowa, giving Bandura a direct academic descent from William James, while Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence were influential collaborators. During his Iowa years, Bandura came to support a style of psychology which sought to investigate psychological phenomena through repeatable, experimental testing. His inclusion of such mental phenomena as imagery and representation, and his concept of reciprocal determinism, which postulated a relationship of mutual influence between an agent and its environment, marked a radical departure from the dominant behaviorism of the time. Bandura's expanded array of conceptual tools allowed for more potent modeling of such phenomena as observational learning and self-regulation, and provided psychologists with a practical way in which to theorize about mental processes, in opposition to the mentalistic constructs of psychoanalysis and personology.

Post-doctoral work

Upon graduation, he participated in a clinical internship with the Wichita Kansas Guidance Center. The following year, he accepted a teaching position at Stanford University in 1953, which he holds to this day. In 1974 the American Psychological Association elected him as president.

Research

Bandura was initially influenced by Robert Sears' work on familial antecedents of social behavior and identificatory learning, He 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, hr 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.

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, in particular, aggression.

Aggression

His research with Walters led to his first book, Adolescent Aggression in 1959, and to a subsequent book, Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis in 1973. During a period 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 as a framework, and that many human behaviors were learned from other humans. Bandura began to analyze means of treating unduly aggressive children by identifying sources of violence in their lives. Initial research in the area had begun in the 1940s under Neal Miller and John Dollard; his continued work in this line eventually culminated in the Bobo doll experiment, and in 1977's hugely influential treatise, Social Learning Theory. Many of his innovations came from his focus on empirical investigation and reproducible investigation, which were alien to a field of psychology dominated by the theories of Freud.

In 1961 Bandura conducted a controversial experiment known as the Bobo doll experiment, designed to show that similar behaviors were learned by individuals shaping their own behavior after the actions of models. Bandura's results from this experiment changed the course of modern psychology, and were widely credited for helping shift the focus in academic psychology from pure behaviorism to cognitive psychology. The experiment is among the most lauded and celebrated of psychological experiments. However, the experiment was criticized by some on ethical grounds, for training children towards aggression.

Social cognitive theory

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

Social Foundations of Thought and Action

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

Self-efficacy

In 1963 He published 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, he published Social Learning Theory , a book that altered the direction psychology took in the 1980s.

While investigating the processes by which modeling alleviates phobic disorders in snake-phobics, he 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 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 of self-efficacy beliefs in human functioning.

In 1986 he 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 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. His bpok, Self-efficacy: The exercise of control (see article) was published in 1997.

Awards

Bandura has received more than sixteen honorary degrees, including those from the University of British Columbia, Alfred University, the University of Rome, the University of Lethbridge, the University of Salamanca in Spain, Indiana University, the University of New Brunswick, Penn State University, Leiden University, and Freie Universitat Berlin, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Universitat Jaume I in Spain, the University of Athens and the University of Catania.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980. In 1999 he received the Thorndike Award for Distinguished Contributions of Psychology to Education from the American Psychological Association, and in 2001, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy. He is the recipient of the Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology Award from the American Psychological Association and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Western Psychological Association, the James McKeen Cattell Award from the American Psychological Society, and the Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Psychological Science from the American Psychological Foundation. In 2008, he received the Grawemeyer Award for contributions to psychology.

Major books

The following books have more than 5,000 citations in Google Scholar=

Main articles: Social Foundations of Thought and Action and Self-Efficacy (book)

• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: the exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman.
• Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

His other books are

• Bandura, A., & Walters, R.H. (1959). Adolescent Aggression. Ronald Press: New York.
• Bandura, A. (1962). Social Learning through Imitation. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, NE.
• Bandura, A. (1969). Principles of behavior modification. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
• Bandura, A. (1971). Psychological modeling: conflicting theories. Chicago: Aldine·Atherton.
• Bandura, A. (1973). Aggression: a social learning analysis. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
• Bandura, A. (1975). Social Learning & Personality Development. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, INC: NJ.
• Bandura, A., & Ribes-Inesta, Emilio. (1976). Analysis of Delinquency and Aggression. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, INC: New Jersey
• Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Notes

• [2]

References

• Bandura, A. (1973). Aggression: A social learning analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
• Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-815614-X
• Bandura, A. (2006). "Toward a Psychology of Human Agency" Perspectives on Psychological Science, Volume 1 Issue 2.
• Bandura, A. (1989). Social cognitive theory. In R. Vasta (Ed.), Annals of Child Development, 6. Six theories of child development (pp. 1–60). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
• Bandura, Albert (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman. p. 604. ISBN 978-0-7167-2626-5Template:Inconsistent citations{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• Bandura, Albert (1999). "Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities" (PDF). Personality & Social Psychology Review. 3 (3): 193–209. doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3. PMID 15661671Template:Inconsistent citations{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
• Bandura, A., & Walters. Richard H. (1959). Adolescent aggression; a study of the influence of child-training practices and family interrelationships. New York: Ronald Press.
• Bandura, A., & Walters, R. H. (1963). Social learning and personality development. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
• Evans, R. I. (1989). Albert Bandura: The man and his ideas: A dialogue. New York: Praeger.
• Haggbloom, S. J., Warnick, R., et al. (2002). The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Review of General Psychology, 6(2), 139–152.
• Zimmerman, Barry J., & Schunk, Dale H. (Eds.)(2003). Educational psychology: A century of contributions. Mahwah, NJ, US: Erlbaum. ISBN 0-8058-3681-0

External links

• Biografia de Albert Bandura Em português no site Psicoloucos.com
• A Teoria Social Cognitiva de Albert Bandura Em português no site Psicoloucos.com
• A Modificação de Comportamento – Albert Bandura Em português no site Psicoloucos.com
• Albert Bandura Web Site
• Great Canadian Psychology Website – Albert Bandura Biography