Albert Bandura
Albert Bandura is considered one of the greatest psychologists and researchers of all time. He is best known for developing the social learning theory. In his experiments, Bandura sought to better understand how children learn and express emotions and behavior. Other researchers continue to consider his theories and experiments as they learn new information about social learning and behavior.
Who was Albert Bandura?
Albert Bandura, born in 1925, was a social cognitive psychologist to whom we give credit for the social learning theory, the idea of self-efficacy and perceived self-efficacy, and the famous experiment with a Bobo doll. He is also considered to be a part of the cognitive revolution of the mid-20th century, whe cognitive theory and the integration of social sciences with other disciplines become popular. Bandura's theories on developmental psychology have minor similarities with some of Freud's work related to the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex and the social learning theory are similar in that they both involve internalizing or adopting someone else's behavior. The main difference is that Freud's theory considers that children only identify with the same gender parent, whereas Bandura's theory claims that children will identify and mirror the behavior of any other person.
Bandura agreed with the behaviorist theories of classical conditioning and operant conditioning. He added that mediating processes occur between stimuli and responses and observational learning, which means that children learn behavior by observing it.
What was Bandura’s approach to psychology?
When someone refers to Albert Bandura’s approach to psychology, they’re referring to his theory of human learning: the social learning theory. Bandura developed a theory that children learn by what they observe in social situations and executed a famous experiment called the Bobo doll experiment to attempt to prove his predictions.
Bandura also theorized that there was a connection between the social learning theory and the cognitive approach. In considering that human beings are active thinkers who consider their behavior and consequences, Bandura explained that cognitive processes must be at work for children to be able to observe behaviors in a social context and make decisions about their own behavior. These factors help children to develop their own human agency and determine whether they should imitate a behavior, intervene with it, or respond in some other way.
In considering the interrelation between cognitive and social learning processes, Bandura identified four mediational processes as factors in whether children emulated another's behavior:
- Attention - The model must behave in such a way as to get the child's attention.
- Retention - The child must remember the behavior of the model and be able to recall it.
- Reproduction - The child must have the ability to be able to perform the modeled behavior. For example, they're not likely to go out and drive the car even if they see it modeled because they can't do it.
- Motivation - The child needs to make a conscious choice about whether the reward or reinforcement is worth emulating the behavior.
The social learning theory couldn't fully explain or account for all behaviors. With this information in mind and his expanded research on human cognition as a whole, Bandura renamed the social learning theory to the social cognitive theory in 1986.
Albert Bandura's name has become synonymous with the Bobo doll experiment, which took place in 1961. To prove that children reproduced the behavior they observed, Bandura set up an experiment and made the following predictions about it:
- He predicted that if children observed an adult acting aggressively, they would emulate the behavior even when the aggressive adult wasn't present.
- He also predicted that children who observed non-aggressive adults would be less aggressive than those who observed aggressive models. Along these lines, he theorized that the non-aggressive group would also be less aggressive than the control group.
- Children would be more inclined to imitate someone of the same gender.
- He surmised that boys would act with more aggression than girls.
To begin the experiment, Bandura recruited 36 boys and 36 girls from the Stanford University nursery school who were ages three to six years old. He grouped 24 kids into a control group with no treatment. He exposed 24 of the kids to an aggressive model and the final 24 children to non-aggressive models. He also separated the boys and girls into different groups.
Critics of the experiment note that the laboratory of this experiment doesn't simulate the real world. They are also quick to point out that Bandura's pool of subjects wasn't diverse, so he couldn't generalize the results to a diverse population. There's also no way to know if children would act more or less aggressively toward a person than a doll. This was not a longitudinal study, so there's no way to measure the results over time. There's a possibility that the kids weren't motivated to be aggressive – they only wanted to please the adults. Perhaps most importantly, some deem Albert Bandura's experiment to be unethical because it may have taught kids to be aggressive.
Albert Bandura helped us learn more about child psychology and behavior, which continues to give us insight today into children—whether they’re just starting out in elementary school or blooming toward adulthood in high school. He developed the social learning theory, which focuses on how children learn and behave given internal, external, positive, and negative reinforcements and any combination thereof.
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