0.17 Social learning theory and personality development  (Page 2/30)

Brief Biography of Albert Bandura

Albert Bandura was born in 1925, in the small town of Mundare, in northern Alberta, Canada. His parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe (his father from Poland, his mother from the Ukraine), and eventually saved enough money to buy a farm. Farming in northern Canada was not easy. One of Bandura’s sisters died during a flu pandemic, one of his brothers died in a hunting accident, and part of the family farm was lost during the Great Depression. Nonetheless, the Bandura family persevered, and maintained a lively and happy home.

Although Bandura’s parents lacked any formal education, they stressed its value. Despite having only one small school in town, which lacked both teachers and academic resources, the town’s children developed a love of learning and most of them attended universities around the world. Following the encouragement of his parents, Bandura also sought a wide variety of other experiences while he was young. He worked in a furniture manufacturing plant, and performed maintenance on the Trans-Alaska highway. The latter experience, in particular, introduced Bandura to a variety of unusual individuals, and offered a unique perspective on psychopathology in everyday life.

When Bandura went to the University of British Columbia, he intended to major in biology. However, he had joined a carpool with engineering and pre-med students who attended classes early in the morning. Bandura looked for a class to fit this schedule, and happened to notice that an introductory psychology course was offered at that time. Bandura enjoyed the class so much that he changed his major to psychology, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1949. Bandura then attended graduate school at the University of Iowa, in a psychology department strongly influenced by Kenneth Spence, a former student of Clark Hull. Thus, the psychology program at the University of Iowa was strongly behavioral in its orientation, and they were well versed in the behavioral research conducted in the psychology department at Yale University.

As we saw in the previous chapter, John Dollard and Neal Miller had established the field of social learning at Yale in the 1930s, but they had done so within the conceptual guidelines of Hullian learning theory. Bandura was not particularly interested in Hull’s approach to learning, but he was impressed by Dollard and Miller’s concepts of modeling and imitation. Bandura received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1952, and then began a postdoctoral position at the Wichita Guidance Center. Bandura was attracted to this position, in part, because the psychologist in charge was not heavily immersed in the Freudian psychodynamic approach that was still so prevalent in clinical psychology.

Following his postdoctoral training, Bandura became a member of the faculty at Stanford University, where he spent the rest of his career. The chairman of Bandura’s department had been studying frustration and aggression, and this influenced Bandura to begin his own studies on social learning and aggression. This research revealed the critical role that modeling plays in social learning, and soon resulted in the publication of Adolescent Aggression (co-authored by Richard Walters, Bandura’s first graduate student; Bandura&Walters, 1959). This line of research also led to the famous “Bobo” doll studies, which helped to demonstrate that even young children can learn aggressive behavior by observing models. Bandura then became interested in self-regulatory behavior in children, and one of the colleagues he collaborated with was Walter Mischel, whose work we will address later in this chapter. During his long and productive career, Bandura became more and more interested in the role played by cognition in social learning, eventually renaming his theory to reflect his social cognitive perspective on human learning. He also examined the role of the individual in influencing the nature of the environment in which they experience life, and how their own expectations of self-efficacy affect their willingness to participate in aspects of that life.