“Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure.” – Albert Bandura (From Self-efficacy: The Exercise of Control, 1997).
Born in a lower middle-class family on the 4th of December 1925 in the small town of Mundare in Canada was Albert Bandura. Due to shortage in teaching staff at local high school, young Albert had to take his own initiative when it came to education. Bandura was dynamic at academics and attended the prestigious University of british Columbia, where he originally chose to major in biology. He stumbled upon the subject psychology while browsing through the course catalogue for filter classes.
He graduated from the university in 1949, majoring in psychology and further chose to continue his post graduation in the same at the University of Iowa. After receiving a job offer from Stanford University he decided to take it up and continued to teach there until his retirement.
Albert Bandura is known worldwide for his Social learning theory which presents the view that not all behaviour was led by rewards of reinforcements, as behaviourism claimed to be the case. He instead offered an alternate view of the social pressures that contribute to learned behaviours – a more modern approach which is still valued.
Bandura’s major theoretical concept is that of modeling or learning through observation, where he emphasizes the role of vicarious reinforcement, the observation of others being reinforced and self-reinforcement, in which individuals reinforce their own behaviour.
While Bandura is often characterized as a moderate behaviourist, his basic assumptions about human nature present a different view of the person from that of J.B watson and B.F. Skinner. Bandura’s theory has been well-researched and has received ample empirical support for it.
Bandura has generously given an immense amount of time to studying and teaching psychology. He served as APA president in 1974 and was named honorary president of the Canadian Psychological Association in 1999. He has been on the editorial boards of about 30 journals. In addition, he has authored seven books, several of which have been translated into various languages.
Over the years, Bandura has collected numerous awards and honors. Including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972), the APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award (1980), the APA William James Award (1989), the APA Thorndike Award for Distinguished Contributions of Psychology to Education (1999), and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy (2001). He has been a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. And has received 14 honorary degrees from universities around the world. Today, Bandura’s name and ideas are familiar to psychologists and psychology students worldwide and is widely described as one of the most influential psychologists of all time.
Informative readings:
The place to go for Bandura’s works is Social Foundations of Thought and Action (1986). If it’s a little too dense for you, you might want to try his earlier Social Learning Theory(1977), or even Social Learning and Personality Development (1963). If aggression is what you’re interested in, try Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis (1973).
