Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory: Behavior, Modeling & Self-Efficacy

Introduction

"Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action" (Bandura, 1977, p. 22).

Albert Bandura is one of the most prominent and important psychological researchers and theorists of the modern era. Bandura developed a foundational theory he calls Social Cognitive Theory, though it is also often referred to as Social Learning Theory. In this theory, Bandura contends that individuals produce behaviors based on their environmental cues — mostly through modeling the behaviors of others — but that this relationship is also reciprocal in that behavior alters the environment, as well as the reverse. Bandura labeled this reciprocal determinism (Bandura, 1978) and used it as a basis for explaining a great deal of bias and change associated with the individual and how he or she interacts with the environment (Boeree, 2006).

Though partly in agreement with behaviorists, Bandura also contends that human behavior is not that simple and that "learning" and/or "cognition" — internal information — also plays a part in behavior, and that behavior in turn influences the environment. In this departure from simple behaviorism, Bandura argued that people are not shaped by reward and sanction alone. Behavioral decisions are more complex and are influenced by internal information, such as the psychology established by previous learning and past modeled behavior, as well as external environmental influences, novel modeling, and reward and sanction events. Bandura has also contributed greatly to a better general understanding of how self-efficacy — one's overall belief in his or her skills and abilities — affects behavior and even life skill development (Bandura, 2006).

Bandura's Background and Early Work

This paper first provides a brief biographical overview of Bandura, then describes his Social Cognitive Theory, and finally discusses how his theory has influenced the development of psychology and other fields intermingled with it, such as criminology, education, and child development.

Bandura was born in 1925 in a rural town in Alberta, Canada, where he had a normal childhood and attended a small combined elementary, middle, and high school that achieved remarkably high success rates for its students despite significant resource limitations. After graduation, he earned an undergraduate degree in 1949 from the University of British Columbia, followed by a PhD from the University of Iowa in 1952. He began teaching at Stanford University in 1953, where he continued his distinguished career for decades. His first full-length book publications began in 1959, though he had published several articles prior to that, beginning in his first year at Stanford (Bandura, 2006). The focus of his first full-length book was the phenomenon of adolescent aggression (Bandura & Walters, 1959).

Since that time, Bandura became a prolific writer, developing — alone and in collaboration — several key texts in both journal and book form that serve as guides for his own theories and additional research on how people learn, exhibit behavior, and why these issues are fundamental to development (Rosenstock, Strecher, & Becker, 1988). Bandura's main focus has always been on gaining a broader understanding of how harmful modeling behaviors create lasting negative behaviors in individuals, and on how to produce better models or intervene early in cases of negative modeling by building self-efficacy (Bandura & Schunk, 1981).

Bandura contends that modeling — good or bad — begins in the home with the family, the child's most influential teachers (Bandura, 1978). He believes that early intervention regarding aggression and deviance should be the ultimate goal of all social scientists, parents, and educators, and that doing so could ultimately resolve a great deal of social and individual ills (Bandura & Walters, 1959). Some of his most influential and enduring experimental models involve children and adolescents and how they learn and unlearn deviant behaviors.

Social Cognitive Theory and Observational Learning

Bandura's Bobo doll experiment — in which a filmed model assaults a toy doll and children who viewed the film subsequently exhibit the same aggressive behavior toward the toy, even in the long term — stands as a lasting demonstration of environmental rather than purely genetic influences on learned behavior in children. In this work, Bandura expanded the understanding of environmental factors by conducting experiments that altered model characteristics and other variables to demonstrate how different models and circumstances changed the degree to which children assimilated the behavior (Boeree, 2006). This experiment and Bandura's subsequent theories began to raise serious questions about media depictions of aggression and how children and adolescents use even obviously fictional portrayals of aggression to develop their own aggressive behavioral styles (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963; Eron, Lefkowitz, Huesmann, & Walder, 1972, pp. 253–263). As Isom (1998) observed, "Bandura's theory has made the public and political affairs realize that [media] violence does cause aggression in children."

The first premise of Social Cognitive Theory — also called Social Learning Theory — is that most human behavior is derived from modeling or imitation: an individual observes another person modeling the behavior and then mimics it, based on the perception of a possible reward for doing so. According to Bandura, observational learning requires four conditions, all of which must be present for modeled behavior to develop: attention, retention, motor reproduction, and motivation (Isom, 1998).

In other words, the individual must be paying attention to the modeled behavior, must be able to remember it, must have the physical ability to reproduce it, and must perceive or anticipate some form of intrinsic or extrinsic reward for doing so. Bandura also contends that reward is fundamentally more effective than punishment as a tool for observational learning, though both influence behavior in the short and long term. Furthermore, once a behavior has been learned through modeling or other means, it is more difficult to eradicate than it was to establish (Boeree, 2006).