Biography
Albert Bandura was born in a small Canadian town located approximately 50 miles from Edmonton in December 4, 1925. Though times were often hard growing up, yet Bandura’s parents placed great emphasis on celebrating life and more importantly family. Bandura would soon became fascinated by psychology after enrolling at the University of British Columbia. He had started out as a biological sciences major and his interest in psychology formed quite by accident and in 1949, he graduated with the Bolocan Award in psychology (annually awarded to the outstanding student in psychology). In 1953 Bandura accepted a one-year instructorship at Stanford University, where he quickly secured a professorship. He remained at Stanford for the rest of his career.
Social Learning
The social learning theory of Bandura emphasizes the importance of observing and modeling the behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions of others. Social learning theory explains human behavior in terms of continuous reciprocal interaction between cognitive, behavioral, an environmental influences. Because it encompasses attention, memory and motivation, social learning theory spans both cognitive and behavioral frameworks.
The component processes underlying observational learning are:
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Bobo Doll Experiment
In 1961 Bandura carried out his famous Bobo doll experiment, a study in which researchers physically and verbally abused a clown-faced inflatable toy in front of preschool-age children, which led the children to later mimic the behavior of the adults by attacking the doll in the same fashion. For this purpose, Bandura designed the Bobo Doll Experiment to try and prove that children would copy an adult role model's behavior. He wanted to show, by using aggressive and non-aggressive actors, that a child would tend to imitate and learn from the behavior of a trusted adult.
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Albert Bandura
Key Concepts & Vocab
- Observational Learning: acquiring information by observing others
- Mirror Neuron: a type of brain cell that fires when you do an action, and also when you simply watch someone else doing the same action
- Modeling: the process of observing and imitating a specific behavior
- Pro-social Behavior: it refers to the phenomenon of people helping each other with no thought of reward or compensation
- Anti-social Behavior: it's disruptive acts characterized by covert and overt hostility and intentional aggression toward others