Albert Bandura was born December 4, 1925 in Mandela, a small village in northern Canada. He was the only son in a large family, he had five older sisters. Bandura spent his school years in a large school, the entire course of which was taught by only two teachers, very much overloaded with work. The entire responsibility for obtaining knowledge, in fact, lay with the students themselves. This, however, did not prevent many of the school’s graduates from entering universities around the world.
After graduating from high school, Bandura worked in Whitehorse in the Yukon on the restoration of the Alaska State Highway. His co-workers were a motley collection of all sorts of delinquent personalities. Here, probably, Bandura received his first knowledge of psychopathology.
After working in this way for one year, Bandura moved to a warmer climate and enrolled at the University of British Columbia. There he received a bachelor’s degree in psychology.
Bandura continued his education at the University of Iowa. Here in 1951 he defended his master’s, and in 1952 — his doctoral dissertation. Bandura then worked as a lecturer at Stanford University, where he received a professorship.
While still a student in Iowa, Bandura met Virginia Varnes, after the wedding they had two daughters — Carol and Mary, who gave him grandchildren Andy and Tim.
In the scientific world, Bandura’s work on modeling, self-efficacy, and adolescent aggression is well known. He is the author of more than 6 books, the creator of the theory of social learning, the owner of many honorary awards. In 1974, Bandura was elected President of the American Psychological Association and was Honorary President of the Canadian Psychological Association.
Albert Bandura’s main contribution to psychology is Social Learning Theory, including the following main points:
- Learning through observing someone else’s behavior, learning from behavioral models
- indirect reinforcement
- Self-control, self-reinforcement, self-punishment
- self-efficacy
The speed of learning depends on the psychological availability of the object of imitation (this is both the possibility of direct communication and the complexity of the behavior being presented), and on the effectiveness of the verbal coding of the observed behavior. Learning by observation is necessary in situations where mistakes can lead to too significant, or even fatal consequences. Based on his theory of social learning, he tried to give a new interpretation of aggression («Agression: A Social Learning Analysis». Englewood Cliffts, 1973).
Initially, Bandura understood aggression as an impulsive, close to pathological reaction to frustration, but then he became convinced that this was not so. It turned out that the theory of aggression as frustration explains the existing facts worse than his theory of learning based on observation of the reward consequences of aggression. He found that aggressive behavior develops in children who are in a learning environment based on examples of adult aggressive behavior. In particular, he found that the fathers of over-aggressive teenagers serve as a model for such behavior, encouraging them to display aggression outside the home (“Adolescent Aggression”, NY, 1959 (with Walters RH)).
Conducting a study on young children, where he showed them films with the encouragement of verbal aggression, he found that in this case, children tend to repeat what they saw (1965). Based on these studies, I came to the conclusion that anger, as a manifestation of general arousal that promotes aggression, will manifest itself only when, in given situational conditions, patterns of angry reactions are socially accepted.
Within the tradition of personality studies, Bandura’s contribution lies primarily in the fact that he turned in an experimental study from generalized character traits to situationally specific forms of behavior («Principles of Behavior Modification», NY, 1969). Literature.
Publications
- Principles of Behavior Modification, 1969
- Social Learning Theory, 1971