Albert Bandura

Overview

Albert Bandura began inside the behaviourist tradition and pushed it until it broke. His argument was that people acquire whole patterns of behaviour by observing someone else, without performing the behaviour themselves and without being reinforced for it, which the standard conditioning account had no room for. The 1961 Bobo doll studies with Dorothea Ross and Sheila Ross are the familiar demonstration: nursery-school children who watched an adult attack an inflatable doll were more likely to attack it themselves. The criticisms are about interpretation rather than replication: the doll is a toy designed to be struck, so children may have been doing what they took the situation to invite, and hitting a toy in a laboratory is a long way from aggression toward people. Bandura went on to develop social cognitive theory, in which self-efficacy, a person's belief in their own capability, is the central construct. Start with the Bobo doll paper, then Social Learning Theory.

Where to start reading

• Transmission of Aggression through Imitation of Aggressive Models 1961

  The Bobo doll study with Dorothea Ross and Sheila Ross, the demonstration that behaviour can be acquired by observation alone.

• Social Learning Theory 1977

  The systematic account of learning through observation, modelling, and expectation rather than through direct reinforcement.

• Social Foundations of Thought and Action 1986

  The mature social cognitive theory, with self-efficacy as its central construct and reciprocal influence between person, behaviour, and environment.

Part of

• Behaviourism
• Social psychology
• Cognitive psychology

Sources

1. Transmission of Aggression through Imitation of Aggressive Models Classics in the History of Psychology, York University
2. Bobo doll experiment WikipediaSets out the demand-characteristics and external-validity criticisms of the design.
3. Albert Bandura Wikipedia