Counselling Central

Albert Bandura was born 4th December 1925 in Mundare, Alberta, Canada. He received his bachelors degree in Psychology from the University of British Columbia in 1949, and PhD from the University of Iowa in 1952. In 1953, while teaching at Stanford University, he collaborated with Richard Walters on his first book ‘Adolescent Aggression’.

Bandura’s Social Learning Theory describes how people learn from one another, via observation, imitation, and modeling. Bandura’s theory has been described as a bridge between behaviorist and cognitive learning theories because it covers attention, memory, and motivation. It has been applied to the understanding of aggression, psychological disorders and modeling.

What is psychological modeling? There are four main steps:

Attention: Bandura believed that to learn you have to be paying attention.

Retention: You have to be able to retain and recall what you have been paying attention to.

Reproduction: describes our ability to imitate what we have seen. Although we can’t always reproduce things immediately, our ability to imitate improves with practise.

Motivation: without motivation it doesn’t matter what you learn, retain or attempt to imitate. Bandura described three types of motivation. 1. Past reinforcement: incentives we received for learning and behaviour in the past. 2. Promised reinforcement: in other words the incentives we can imagine for doing something. 3. Vicarious reinforcement: seeing and recalling the model being reinforced.

Bandura also believed in “reciprocal determinism”, which describes how the world and a person’s behaviour cause each other. Bandura was studying adolescent aggression and found the behaviorist notion that one’s environment causes one’s behavior as too limiting. He theorised that behaviour also causes environment , and soon considered personality as an interaction between the environment, behavior, and one’s psychological processes. Psychological processes describe our ability to entertain images and language in our minds.

Bandura states that “Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others, one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.”