Albert Bandura: biography of one of the most influential psychologists

Albert Bandura is one of the best known psychologists in the history of the science of human behavior.

He holds the honor of being recognized as the greatest living psychologist and has been compared to others of the stature of Freud who have passed away. However, his thinking is not at all Freudian, nor is it behaviorist as many continue to believe today.

Ideologist of social learning theory and very prolific author, his life is marked by a great contribution to psychology and for having changed the vision of learning in the middle of the Last century. Let's see his interesting life through a brief biography of Albert Bandura, in which we will also see his contributions to psychology.

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Biography of Albert Bandura

The following is a more in-depth discussion of the life events of this Canadian psychologist.

1. Early years

Albert Bandura was born in Mundare, Canada, on December 4, 1925. His family, which was of Ukrainian and Polish origins, was numerous, which is why since his childhood, Bandura, who was the youngest of the six siblings, showed aptitude to fend for himself the same.

Living in a relatively small town, the local education did not always have everything necessary to teach everything that the students needed. So his teachers encouraged him to take care of his learning outside of class himself.

During his stay at the school, Bandura realized that knowledge is unstable, which changes over timeEither because new findings are discovered or because the information is out of date.

However, he also saw that the tools he had acquired to investigate on his own served him well. to be updated over the years. It is possible that this influenced his adult opinion about the importance that the student acquires in his own educational process.

2. University education

Although Bandura originally intended to study biology, he ultimately chose to pursue undergraduate studies in psychology, specifically at the University of British Columbia.

The way Albert Bandura behaved during his college years is surprising. He liked to go several hours before classes started at his university and, out of boredom, he decided to sign up for several extra subjects. It was in these subjects that he had contact with the science of human behavior, awakening him a great fascination.

It took him only three years to finish his university studies, graduating in 1949 and, later, he decided study the Master of Clinical Psychology at the University of Iowa, in the United States, obtaining a degree in 1952.

3. Professional life

After completing the master's degree and later obtaining his doctorate, Albert Bandura he got an offer to work at Stanford university, in which he has remained the rest of his life and, to this day, continues to be a professor, although emeritus.

During his beginnings as a professor at the institution, the psychologist focused on offering his classes in the most efficient way, as well as initiating research on adolescent assaults.

Over time, was gaining a deeper insight into behavior by imitation, formulating hypotheses and theories about aspects such as behavioral imitation, either with or without rewards or punishments after taking the action.

These first interests in these aspects little by little were transformed into what is perhaps the best known theory of Albert Bandura, the theory of social learning.

The Bobo Doll: Social Learning Theory

The Bobo Doll Experiment is surely Albert Bandura's most famous research on imitation behavior.

This research was carried out in 1961 and consisted of making several children watch a movie and others not. It showed several adults physically and verbally assaulting an inflatable doll, named Bobo. Next, both the children who had seen the film and those who had not were taken to a room where Bobo was. The children who had seen the video they behaved in a similar way as adults had, being violent with the doll.

This finding was a great discovery in the 1960s, since it clashed with the main idea of ​​behaviorism, which argued that the human behavior was motivated solely by the presence of rewards and punishments, not by simple imitation behaviors without reward some.

So that, children imitated adults without being given anything in return. Vicarious learning was formally demonstrated and, through this experiment, Bandura was able to develop his well-known theory of social learning.

The theory of social learning tries to understand how the acquisition of knowledge, beliefs, attitudes and ways of thinking of the person with respect to the social environment occurs. The premise underlying this theory is that learning is a cognitive process that cannot be separated from the context in which it occurs, be it family, school or of any other nature.

As we were already commenting, the general vision that was had in psychology in the middle of the last century, especially in North America, He was a behaviorist, defending himself that learning was a process that was the result of a series of rewarded or rewarded actions. punished.

But Bandura proved otherwise, that learning was rather the result of the child's imitation in seeing both equals and their parents and other adults do certain actions. This led to the inclusion in behavior of a whole behavioral repertoire seen in their closest social environment, in addition to acquiring the same ways of seeing the world and relating to it. All this without the need for reinforcements to be offered.

Although it should be noted that reinforcement and punishment are important aspects in the acquisition of certain behaviors, it should not be assumed that all learning will be based on conditioning. So that, this theory has served as a bridge between behaviorism and cognitivism, understanding that there are some learning that does work based on being conditioned and others are given by imitation.

There are several postulates that can be highlighted from Bandura's theory of social learning:

1. Learning is partially cognitive

Prior to Bandura's experiments, it was widely assumed within the community of psychologists that all learning occurred in response to certain environmental circumstances.

However, social learning theory argues that higher mental processes should not be neglected, that the individual can really process the information beyond whether or not there are reinforcements that invite the behavior to be replicated.

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2. Not all learning is observable

According to the investigation of Bandura and several of his followers, not all learning has to be manifested externally immediately after it has been acquired.

Actions such as observation, reflection and decision-making, although invisible, acquire great importance in learning and can involve the inclusion or omission of certain behaviors.

3. Vicar Reinforcement

Another of the main ideas of the theory proposed by Bandura is the fact that a person can perform or inhibit her behaviors without having to be the one who is receiving the punishments or rewards for having carried it out.

By observing how others behave and how they are benefited or harmed by it, a person can change her behavior based on what he has seen.

It is here where the concept of vicarious reinforcement becomes important, that is, some type of beneficial or, otherwise, harmful factor that motivates the performance or not of a behavior. It has been seen that this behavior is purely human, not manifested in other species.

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4. The relationship between learner and environment

According to the theory, the learner is not a passive individual who receives the new knowledge in a totally given way and without participating in the process.

On the contrary, the person makes a whole series of changes in his beliefs, attitudes and ideas that he can use to change his environment. So that, both learner and environment have a reciprocal relationship, modifying each other.

Albert Bandura and his relationship with behaviorism

There are many people, and even books specialized in psychology, who relate the figure of Albert Bandura with that of behaviorism. However, it must be said that this author has always considered that his point of view does not coincide with all the ideas defended by behavioral psychologists.

In fact, in his early days, this author defended the idea that it was simplistic to reduce all human behavior in terms of cause and effect relationships. However, it can be said that in several of his works he makes use of properly behavioral terms, as are stimulus and response, among others.

According to Bandura himself, his vision of human behavior could be included within what It has been called social cognitivism, a current that differs considerably from behaviorism traditional.

Works, merits and contributions

Albert Bandura has the merit of being the most cited living psychologist throughout the world, and of all psychologists, both living and dead, to be in fourth place, behind only B. F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget. Bandura's works, despite being considered behaviorist on many occasions, have contributed to what has been called "the cognitive revolution", started in the late 60's, affecting multiple fields of psychology.

He has written some books, among which stands out Aggression: An Analysis of Social Learning 1973, in which he focused on the origins of aggression and the importance it acquired from being imitated by vicarious learning. Also, and not at all omittable, is his work Social learning theory, from 1977, where his vision of this type of learning was explained in great detail.

Among the honors that this psychologist has been able to show have been being the president of the APA in 1974, in addition to receiving two awards from this same association in 1980 and 2004 for his scientific contribution.

Bibliographic references:

• Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
• Bandura, A. (1999b). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 193–209.
• Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 1–26.
• Bandura, A., & Walters, R. H. (1959). Adolescent aggression. New York: Ronald Press.