Albert Bandura's Personality Theory

The psychologist and theorist Albert bandura He was born in Canada in late 1925. On the verge of entering the 1950s, Bandura received his BA in Psychology from Columbia University.

Given his brilliant record, in 1953 he began teaching at the prestigious Stanford University. Years later, Bandura held the position of president in the APA (American Psychological Association).

His theories are still valid today, and in Psychology and Mind we have already echoed some of them:

• "The Theory of Social Learning of Albert Bandura"

• "The Theory of Self-efficacy of Albert Bandura"

The Theory of Personality: background and context

The behaviorism It is a school of the Psychology which underlines the importance of experimental methods and tries to analyze observable and measurable variables. Therefore, it tends to reject also all aspects of psychology that cannot be grasped, everything subjective, internal and phenomenological.

The usual procedure using the experimental method it is the manipulation of certain variables, to later assess the effects on another variable. As a result of this conception of the human psyche and the tools available to assess personality, the

Albert Bandura Personality Theory gives greater relevance to the environment as the genesis and key modulator of the behavior of each individual.

A new concept: the reciprocal determinism

During his first years as a researcher, Albert Bandura specialized in the study of the aggression phenomenon in adolescents. He soon realized that, although observable elements were crucial in establishing a solid and scientific basis for the study of certain phenomena, and without renouncing the principle that it is the environment that causes human behavior, he could also make another reflection.

The environment causes the behavior, certainly, but the behavior also causes the environment. This quite innovative concept was called reciprocal determinism: material reality (social, cultural, personal) and individual behavior cause each other.

Psychological processes complete the equation (from behaviorism to cognitivism)

Months later, Bandura took a step further and began to value personality as a complex interaction between three elements: environment, behavior and individual psychological processes. These psychological processes include the human capacity to retain images in the mind and aspects related to language.

This is a key aspect to understand Albert Bandura, since when introducing this last variable he abandons the orthodox behavioral postulates and begins to approach the cognitivism. In fact, Bandura is currently considered one of the fathers of cognitivism.

Adding imagination and language aspects to your understanding of personality human, Bandura starts from elements much more complete than pure behaviorists, such as B.F. Skinner. Thus, Bandura will analyze crucial aspects of the human psyche: the observational learning (also called modeling) and self-regulation.

Observational learning (modeling)

Of the many studies and research carried out by Albert Bandura, there is one that was (and still is) the subject of special attention. The studies on the bobo doll. The idea came from a video recorded by one of his students, where a girl repeatedly hit an inflatable egg-shaped doll called “Bobo”.

The girl mercilessly poked the doll, while she yelled "stupid!" She beat him, both with punches and with a hammer, and accompanied these aggressive actions with insults. Bandura showed the video to a group of children from a nursery, who enjoyed the video. Later, after the video session was over, the children were ushered into a playroom, where a new goofy doll and small hammers awaited them. Obviously, Bandura and his collaborators were also in the room, analyzing the behavior of the offspring.

Children They didn't take long to grab the hammers and hit the silly doll, mimicking the insults of the girl in the video. Thus, shouting "stupid!", They copied all the ‘misdeeds’ that they had seen minutes before.

Although the conclusions of this experiment may not seem very surprising, they did serve to confirm several things: the children changed their behavior without there being any reinforcement aimed at doing that behaviour. This will not be an extraordinary reflection for any parent or teacher who has spent time with children, but it is nonetheless. created a schism regarding behavioral learning theories.

Bandura called this phenomenon "observational learning" (or modeling). You can learn about his learning theory through this summary:

"The Theory of Social Learning of Albert Bandura"

Modeling: analyzing its components

Attention, retention, reproduction and motivation

The systematic study and variations of the dummy test allowed Albert Bandura to establish the different steps involved in the modeling process.

1. Attention

If you want to learn anything, you must pay attention. Likewise, all the elements that pose an obstacle to paying the maximum possible attention will result in worse learning.

For example, if you are trying to learn something but your mental state is not the most ideal (because you are half asleep, feel unwell or have taken drugs), your degree of acquisition of new knowledge will be affected. The same happens if you have distracting elements.

The object to which we pay attention also has certain characteristics that can attract more (or less) our attention.

2. Retention

No less important than paying proper attention, it is be able to retain (remember, memorize) what we are studying or trying to learn. It is at this point that language and imagination play an important role: we retain what we have seen in the form of images or verbal descriptions.

Once we have stored the knowledge, images and / or descriptions in our mind, we are able to remember consciously those data, so that we can reproduce what we have learned and even repeat it, modulating our behaviour.

3. Reproduction

When we get to this step, we should be able to decode retained images or descriptions to help us change our behavior in the present.

It is important to understand that, when learning to do something that requires a mobilization of our behavior, we must be able to reproduce the behavior. For example, you can spend a week watching ice skating videos, but not even be able to put on a pair of skates without falling to the ground. You can't skate!

But if you do know how to ice skate instead, it is likely that repeated viewing of videos in which skaters better than you perform jumps and pirouettes result in an improvement of your skills.

It is also important, with respect to reproduction, to know that our ability to imitate behaviors gradually improve the more we practice the skills involved in certain task. Furthermore, our abilities tend to improve simply by imagining ourselves performing the behavior. This is what is known as "Mental Training”And is widely used by athletes and athletes to improve their performance.

4. Motivation

The motivation It is a key aspect when it comes to learning those behaviors that we want to imitate. We must have reasons and motives for wanting to learn something, otherwise it will be more difficult to focus attention, retain and reproduce these behaviors.

According to Bandura, the most frequent reasons why we want to learn something, They are:

• Past reinforcement, like classical behaviorism. Something that we have liked to learn before has more ballots to like now.

• Promised reinforcements (incentives), all those future benefits that push us to want to learn.

• Vicar Reinforcement, which gives us the possibility of recovering the model as a reinforcement.

These three reasons are linked to what psychologists have traditionally considered as the elements that "cause" learning. Bandura explains that such elements are not so much the "cause" as the "reasons" for wanting to learn. A subtle but relevant difference.

Of course, negative motivations They can also exist, and they push us not to imitate certain behavior:

• Past punishment

• Promised punishment (threats)

• Vicarious punishment

Self-regulation: another key to understanding the human personality

The self-regulation (that is, the ability to control, regulate and model our own behavior), is the other fundamental key to personality. In his theory, Bandura points to these three steps towards self-regulation:

1. Self-observation

We perceive ourselves we evaluate our behavior and this serves to establish a coherent corpus (or not) of what we are and what we do.

2. Judgment

We compare our behaviors and attitudes with certain standards. For example, we often compare our actions with culturally acceptable ones. Or we are also capable of creating new acts and habits, such as going for a run every day. In addition, we can instill in ourselves the courage to compete with others, or even with ourselves.

3. Auto-responding

If in the comparison we make with our standards we come out well, we give each other positive reward responses to ourselves. In case the comparison creates discomfort (because we do not conform to what we think would be correct or desirable), we give punishment responses. These responses can range from the most purely behavioral (staying working late or apologizing to the boss), to more emotional and covert aspects (feeling of shame, self defense, etc).

One of the important elements in Psychology that serves to understand the self-regulation process is the selfconcept (also know as self-esteem). If we look back and perceive that we have acted throughout our lives more or less according to our values ​​and we have lived in an environment that has conferred us rewards and praise, we will have a good self-concept and therefore a self-esteem high. In the reverse case, if we have been unable to live up to our values ​​and standards, we are likely to have poor self-concept, or low self-esteem.

Recapping

Albert Bandura and his Personality Theory based on the behavioral and cognitive aspects involved in learning and in the acquisition of behaviors had a great impact on the personality theories and in the psychological therapy. His thesis, which started from the behaviorist postulates but embraced innovative elements that allowed to explain better the phenomena concerning the human personality, earned him wide recognition in the community scientific

His approach to personality was not merely theoretical but rather prioritized action and solution to practical problems linked, above all, to learning in childhood and adolescence, but also to other fields of great significance.

Scientific psychology seemed to have found in behaviorism, at the time when Bandura was taking his first steps as a teacher, a privileged place within the academic world, where the knowledge base is extracted through studies measurable. Behaviorism was the approach preferred by the great majority, since it was based on the observable and left aside the mental or phenomenological aspects, not observable and therefore not coupled with the scientific method.

However, at the end of the 60s and thanks to capital figures like Albert Bandura, behaviorism has given way to the “cognitive revolution”. The cognitive psychology combines the experimental and positivist orientation of behaviorism, but without kidnapping the researcher in the study of observable behaviors externally, since it is precisely the mental life of people that must always remain in the orbit of what the Psychology.