Albert Bandura

Albert Bandura (1925–2021) was a Canadian-American psychologist whose research on observational learning, social cognitive theory, and self-efficacy reshaped the study of human behavior.

Observational learning: Learning that occurs by watching another person’s behavior and its consequences. Bandura made learning from observed models central to his account of behavior.
Bobo doll experiment: A set of experiments in which children who watched adults behave aggressively toward a doll later imitated that behavior. The studies provided influential evidence that children can acquire behavior by observation.
Social learning theory: A family of theories explaining how people acquire behavior by observing others and interacting socially. Bandura’s early work developed this broader approach to learning.
Self-efficacy in health behavior: The use of perceived capability to explain and predict health-related actions and persistence. Bandura’s construct helps explain confidence in adopting and maintaining health behaviors.
Richard Walters: A Canadian-American psychologist who collaborated with Bandura on research into social learning and aggression. Walters coauthored Bandura’s early work that helped establish social learning theory.
Self-efficacy: A person’s belief in their capacity to organize and carry out actions needed for a particular goal. Bandura developed this construct to explain how beliefs shape effort and persistence.
Bobo doll: An inflatable weighted toy used in experiments on children’s imitation of aggressive behavior. The toy was the target in Bandura’s best-known modeling experiments.
Behaviorism: An approach to psychology that explains behavior through observable actions and their relations to the environment. Bandura challenged accounts that treated direct reinforcement as necessary for learning.
Social learning theory in criminology: An account of criminal behavior as learned through social interaction, imitation, and reinforcement. Bandura’s work on modeled aggression informed social explanations of acquired behavior.
Dale Schunk: An American educational psychologist known for research on self-efficacy, motivation, and learning. Schunk extended Bandura’s ideas into educational psychology.

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