Albert Bandura's Social Learning Theory Explained

Introduction

Albert Bandura is renowned as the primary architect of social learning theory, having introduced what became known as social cognitive theory. Although he worked within the behavioral tradition, Bandura was primarily concerned with the influence of cognitive factors on development. Like other behaviorists, he acknowledged that cognitive development alone cannot explain all changes in childhood behavior and that learning processes are fundamentally responsible for children's development. Nevertheless, Bandura believed that a child's cognitive abilities have a strong influence on his or her learning processes — an influence that becomes especially pronounced in more complex types of learning.

Albert Bandura was born on December 4, 1925, in northern Alberta, Canada, as the youngest child and only son among six siblings in a family of European descent (Thom, n.d.). His parents immigrated to Canada during their adolescent years; his father came from Poland and his mother from Ukraine. Although neither parent had received any formal education, they both placed a high value on educational achievement. This commitment is illustrated by the fact that Bandura's father taught himself to read three languages: German, Polish, and Russian.

Bandura's Biography

Because of a shortage of teachers and resources, learning was largely left to each student's own initiative, and Bandura spent his elementary and high school years at the only school in town. Despite its limitations, the school produced an unusual cohort of graduates, most of whom went on to attend universities in other parts of the world. After graduating from high school, Bandura worked on the Alaska Highway in Yukon, filling holes to prevent the road from continual sinking.

Bandura later attended the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to continue his education. His choice of psychology as a major came almost entirely by chance: he discovered that an introductory psychology course fit conveniently into his early-morning schedule, even though he had originally intended to major in a biological science. He commuted each morning with engineering and pre-med students who began their day early, and after taking the introductory class he became deeply interested in the field and decided to pursue it. In 1949, Bandura graduated with the Bolocan Award in Psychology, presented to the top student in the discipline.

His interest in learning theory and the behaviorist tradition deepened when he entered graduate study at the University of Iowa, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1952. It was during those years that he met Virginia Varns, an instructor at the College of Nursing, whom he married in 1952. The couple had two daughters, Mary and Carol, born in 1954 and 1958, respectively. Following graduation, Bandura accepted a post-doctoral position at the Wichita Guidance Center in Wichita, Kansas, before taking a teaching position at Stanford University in 1953, where he has remained throughout his career.

The development of Bandura's social learning theory is largely rooted in his work at Stanford University, where he began studying family patterns that produce aggressive behavior in children. In collaboration with his first graduate student, Richard Walters, he investigated the familial causes of aggression and identified the central role that learning by observation plays in that process. Bandura and Walters found that hyper-aggressive adolescents typically had parents who modeled hostile attitudes. Although these parents would not tolerate aggression within the home, they demanded that their children be tough and resolve conflicts with peers through physical means if necessary. As a result, the adolescents tended to replicate the aggressive and hostile attitudes they observed in their parents. These findings directly informed Bandura's first two books, on adolescent aggression and on aggression from a social learning perspective.

Building on what he had learned about observational learning, Bandura expanded his work to include conceptual modeling of rule-governed behavior. This line of research motivated him to conduct a program of studies on social modeling using an inflatable doll — the now-famous Bobo doll experiment. Children who participated in these studies were exposed to models who displayed either violent or non-violent behavior toward the doll.

Children who observed violent models subsequently demonstrated aggression toward the doll, while those in the control group showed aggression far less frequently. From these results, Bandura concluded that children altered their behavior through simple observation of a model rather than through direct personal reinforcement. This finding directly contradicted standard behavioristic learning theory. While Bandura acknowledged that human behavior can change through reinforcement, he proposed — and verified empirically — that people can learn new behaviors without experiencing direct reinforcement at all.

Context in Which Bandura's Theory Was Developed

Bandura is widely recognized for developing social learning theory, a field he entered almost by accident when he chose psychology as his undergraduate major. The central premise of the theory is that people learn from one another through observation, modeling, and imitation. The theory is often described as a bridge between cognitive and behaviorist learning theories because it incorporates attention, memory, and motivation.

Behaviorism generally focuses on experimental methods and variables that can be observed, measured, and manipulated, and it largely sets aside internal or mental phenomena. In the standard experimental approach, one variable is manipulated and its effect on others is measured. This framework reduces personality theory to the proposition that an individual's environment causes his or her behavior.

For the phenomena he was studying — specifically, adolescent aggression — Bandura found this account too simplistic and chose to add additional dimensions to the equation. He proposed that while the environment shapes behavior, behavior also shapes the environment. Because he argued that the world and an individual's behavior mutually cause each other, Bandura termed this relationship reciprocal determinism (Boeree, 1998).

Bandura went further by examining personality as a relationship among three elements: an individual's psychological processes, behavior, and environment. The psychological processes include the ability to form mental images and to use language. Notably, it was at this point that Bandura moved away from rigid behaviorism by introducing imagery and aligning himself with the cognitivists — a move that has led many scholars to regard him as a founder of the cognitivist movement. Adding language and imagery to his framework allowed Bandura to theorize more comprehensively than many other cognitivists. He synthesized two capacities widely considered central to human cognition: observational learning (or modeling) and self-regulation.

Through his studies of children's responses to the Bobo doll, Bandura tested a large number of variations — rewarding or punishing models in different ways, using less prestigious or less attractive models, and offering children rewards for imitating behaviors. These variations allowed him to identify the specific steps involved in the modeling process and to establish that observational learning and self-regulation are the core mechanisms of his theory.

Bandura's Social Learning Theory

In order to learn anything, a person must carefully attend to the relevant features of the modeled behavior (Moore, 1999). Several factors influence how much attention an observer pays, including characteristics of both the observer and the model, as well as competing stimuli in the environment. If the model is dramatic and vivid, the observer tends to pay greater attention. Likewise, if the model appears especially competent, prestigious, or attractive, attention increases. Because learning depends on attention, anything that diminishes attention will also diminish learning — including observational learning.

Beyond paying attention, a person must be able to retain what has been observed through mechanisms such as mental imagery, symbolic coding, symbolic rehearsal, motor rehearsal, and cognitive organization ("Social Learning Theory — Bandura," n.d.). If a person is influenced by observing a behavior, he or she must be able to remember the modeled activity at a later point in time. This is the stage at which language and imagery become crucial, because people retain what they have observed in the form of verbal descriptions and mental images. These stored representations can later be recalled — as an image or a description — in order to reproduce the behavior.

Reproduction involves translating symbolic representations into appropriate actions; performance improves with practice. A person who has attended to and retained a behavior can convert those mental representations into actual conduct, thereby demonstrating the capacity to reproduce what was modeled. This reproduction is accomplished by organizing one's own responses according to the pattern provided by the model.

Motivation is the final element in Bandura's social learning theory. A person's willingness to imitate a particular behavior depends on the presence of motivating factors — such as the rewards he or she anticipates. Perceived rewards act as positive reinforcers of behavior, while negative reinforcers discourage continuation of the modeled activity. Because a child will respond to behavior through either reinforcement or punishment, he or she is more likely to continue performing a behavior that is reinforced.

Reinforcement can be positive or negative, and it can be internal or external. For example, if a child seeks approval from peers or parents, that approval constitutes an external reinforcement for continuing the behavior. Conversely, the child's own feelings of happiness resulting from that approval represent an internal reinforcement. In general, children tend to behave in ways they believe will earn approval, driven by their desire for such reinforcement.

It is important to note that reinforcement — whether positive or negative — is the primary driver of behavioral change. There is also the possibility of vicarious reinforcement, which refers to a child's tendency to observe what happens to others when deciding whether or not to imitate a particular action (McLeod, 2011).