Albert Bandura
| Albert Bandura | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 4, 1925 Mundare, Alberta |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Fields | Psychology, Philosophy of Action |
| Institutions | Stanford University |
| Alma mater | University of British Columbia University of Iowa |
| Known for | social cognitive theory self-efficacy social learning theory Bobo doll experiment human agency |
| Influences | Robert Sears, Clark Hull, Kenneth Spence, Arthur Benton. Neal Miller |
| Influenced | psychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology |
Albert Bandura (born December 4, 1925, in Mundare, Alberta, Canada) is a psychologist and the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University. Over a career spanning almost six decades, Bandura 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.[1] Bandura is widely described as the greatest living psychologist,[2][3][4][5] and as one of the most influential psychologists of all time.[6][7]
In 2008 Bandura won the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology.
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[edit] 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.
[edit] 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 [8], giving Bandura a direct academic descent from William James [9], 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.[10]
[edit] 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 held until his retirement on March 15, 2010. [11] In 1974 the American Psychological Association elected him as its president.
[edit] Research
Bandura was initially influenced by Robert Sears' work on familial antecedents of social behavior and identificatory learning, Bandura 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, Bandura 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. sho2x theory
[edit] Analysis of Aggression
Bandura's 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 learnt 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; Bandura's continued work in this line eventually culminated in the Bobo doll experiment, and in 1977's enormously influential treatise, Social Learning Theory.[12] Many of Bandura's 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.
[edit] The Bobo Doll Experiment
In 1961 Bandura conducted a controversial experiment known as the Bobo doll experiment, to study patterns of behaviour associated with aggression. Bandura hoped that the experiment would prove that aggression can be explained, at least in part, by social learning theory, and that similar behaviors were learned by individuals modeling their own behavior after the actions of others. The experiment was criticized by some on ethical grounds [13], for training children towards aggression. Bandura's results from the Bobo Doll 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 Bobo Doll Experiment is among the most lauded and celebrated of psychological experiments.
[edit] Self-efficacy
In 1963 Bandura 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, Bandura published the ambitious Social Learning Theory, a book that altered the direction psychology took in the 1980s.[citation needed]
In the course of investigating the processes by which modeling alleviates phobic disorders in snake-phobics, Bandura 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 then 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 that self-efficacy beliefs play in human functioning.
In 1986 Bandura 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 social cognitive 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. Self-efficacy: The exercise of control was published in 1997.
[edit] 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. 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 also 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.
[edit] Notes
<http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/bandurabio.html>
- ^ Haggbloom S.J. (2002). The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, Review of General Psychology, 6 (2). 139-152.
- ^ http://www.all-about-psychology.com/psychology-videos.html
- ^ http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2006/sepoct/features/bandura.html
- ^ http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=48cdc46f-fa8a-4f03-8be2-5463567e17cf
- ^ http://www.livestrong.com/health-article/transmission-aggression-through-imitation-aggressive-models-by-albert-bandura-the-psychology-ebook-collection_9760e5df-f9db-377b-ce6f-26eef8df5b72/
- ^ http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/tp/ten-influential-psychologists.htm
- ^ http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/bandura.html
- ^ http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/banconversion.html, See end of page for Bandura's own statement.
- ^ http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/bangenealogy.html
- ^ http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/bandura.html
- ^ https://www.stanford.edu/dept/psychology/system/files/BanduraCV.pdf
- ^ http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/crimtheory/bandura.htm
- ^ http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Social_learning
[edit] 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 013815614X
- 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, pp. 604, ISBN 9780716726265, http://books.google.com/?id=eJ-PN9g_o-EC
- Bandura, Albert (1999), "Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities", Personality & Social Psychology Review 3 (3): 193–209, doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3, PMID 15661671, http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/Bandura1999PSPR.pdf
- 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 0805836810
[edit] External links
| Educational offices | ||
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| Preceded by Leona Tyler |
President of the | Succeeded by Donald Campbell |
