Albert Bandura: Theories of Social Learning, Self Efficacy, & Personality​

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
People learn by observing, not just by doing. This is one of many insights from psychologist Albert Bandura. Here’s more about his contributions to psychology.
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In my twenties, I was in a romantic relationship where I struggled to hold healthy boundaries with my partner. If she thought she was right about something, she would insist upon it until I gave in. If I did not want to do something, or did not share a value of hers, she would try to convince me to change my mind, and I usually lacked the backbone and self-confidence to stand my ground.
One day, she pointed out that I always crossed my arms in front of my body during conflicts, just like she’d seen my dad do when he was having a conversation like that. I suddenly realized that so many of my ways of relating to her, both good and bad, were things nobody had taught me, exactly—instead, they were just what I watched my dad do, again and again, when I was growing up.

To psychologist Albert Bandura, one of the most famous social psychologists of all time, my learning of this relationship behavior would make perfect sense. I had learned how to be a partner in part from watching my dad—my main male role model—be a partner to my mom. So although conflict was rarely big or painful in my family growing up, I had still adopted the same defensive physical stance my dad took when things got hard at home. Keeping this example in mind, let’s look at the life and accomplishments of Albert Bandura to better understand how his work shaped the field of psychology, and social psychology in particular.​
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Who Is Albert Bandura? (A Definition)​

Albert Bandura was a Canadian-born psychologist who spent most of his professional years conducting research at American universities. He was born in 1925 and raised in a tiny town in the Canadian province of Alberta. With few educational resources at his disposal, he had to become a self-guided learner at a young age (Bandura & Evans, 2006). After graduating from high school, he worked briefly in Alaska before going to the University of British Columbia in 1946.

Funnily enough, Bandura entered the field of psychology out of boredom: He had mornings open one semester and decided to fill the time with a psychology course. He became a star psychology student at the University of British Columbia and transitioned immediately into graduate school, earning a PhD in psychology from the University of Iowa in just three years. 

Even as a graduate student, Bandura was innovative (Bandura & Evans, 2006). The behaviorist approach, which argued that behaviors were the only really meaningful psychological phenomena to study, was the prevailing theory of the time. Bandura tried to make his experiments focus not just on behavior but on mental processes as well. In other words, he believed from early on that mental processes and behaviors interacted with each other; this core belief would influence his work throughout his career.​

Bandura began teaching psychology and conducting research at Stanford University shortly after getting his PhD, and he remained there for the duration of his professional career. In fact, he died in Stanford in 2021, at the ripe old age of 95.

Albert Bandura’s Contributions to Psychology​

Bandura’s most enduring contributions to psychology come from his experiments showing the power of observational learning and his development of social cognitive theory (Bandura, 2014). His work and theories were fundamental in moving the field of psychology away from behaviorism and toward a more cognitive approach. Additionally, Bandura is known as the originator of the concept of self-efficacy, or one’s sense that one is able to handle one’s responsibilities in life. All of these contributions to psychology stimulated decades of research and were particularly influential in the development of the subfield called social psychology, which grew immensely across Bandura’s lifetime.

Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory

Bandura’s social learning theory moved psychology beyond the idea that people (and animals) can only learn from their own behaviors. Behaviorists had observed that people and animals are powerfully influenced by the rewards and punishments that come from their own actions; if I took some Legos from my younger sibling as a little kid and my parents became upset with me, I learned that stealing Legos was not going to end well. Over time, the behaviorist theory went, I would learn not to take without asking because I kept experiencing negative consequences when I stole.

Bandura proposed that we could learn quite effectively without getting punished ourselves; instead, simply seeing other people have the experience could provide the learning (Bandura, 1974). He made the point that many of our behaviors do not have immediate, reinforcing consequences. For example, if you plagiarized somebody in writing a class essay, you might not get in trouble until your professor or teacher read the paper, which could be days or weeks later. Bandura (1974) reasoned that we must be capable of thinking ahead and imagining possible outcomes for ourselves, and one way we could gather critical information for this imaginative process was by observing other people in action. To take the example from my childhood, perhaps seeing my preschool teachers scold other children for taking toys without asking was one reason I knew not to take what my sibling was playing with.

Albert Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment

The primary experiments upon which Bandura based his social learning theory were conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They are well known as Bandura’s Bobo doll experiments. In a series of experiments, Bandura et al. (1961) had each child participant enter the psychology laboratory, where an adult experimenter showed them around a room with some toys. After introducing the child to the toys, which included a five-foot-tall inflatable Bobo doll, and modeling nonaggressive behavior, the experimenter would either put together a toy in front of the child or pick up a toy hammer and attack the Bobo doll for several minutes. Then the experimenter would leave the room, and the researchers would wait to see what happened.

Their theory was that children learn by imitation and are influenced by what they see others doing. And sure enough, the children who observed the adult being aggressive toward the doll were much more likely to end up hitting the doll themselves than were the children who observed no aggressive behavior in the experiment.​

These results were provocative for several reasons, but primarily because they demonstrated that children would learn to aggress in a novel environment simply from watching an adult they had just met be aggressive. It was a striking example of how powerful the drive to imitate others can be—especially when there are no apparent negative consequences for potentially damaging behavior.

Albert Bandura & Cognitive Theory

Over time, the social learning theory that Bandura conceptualized in his Bobo doll experiments evolved into what he called social cognitive theory (Bandura, 2001). Social cognitive theory sees predicting behavior as requiring an understanding of the person, the environment, and how the environment can exert social influence on the person. It is a more comprehensive theory of predicting human behavior than many ideas that came before it because it takes into consideration a number of personal factors, such as prior experiences of learning and reinforcement, as well as the situational factors that differ from one context to the next.​

With social cognitive theory, Bandura formalized many of his key contributions to psychology, such as reciprocal determinism and self-efficacy. (For more on these topics, keep reading.) It combined these ideas into a coherent theory that psychologists could and have tested many times over, finding that many of its core features, when studied together, predict human behavior (e.g., Young et al., 2014).

Albert Bandura & Personality Theory​

Bandura (1999) did not subscribe to the belief that personalities can be considered fixed or consistent across contexts. Instead, he believed that the parts of our personalities that come out in any particular moment are heavily influenced by the context we find ourselves in. Am I an assertive person or a passive person, an extrovert or an introvert? It depends on whether I am among friends or strangers, whether I am doing something I enjoy or something that is entirely new to me. As Bandura notes, you might be very assertive with a cashier at the pharmacy counter but much less so when a police officer pulls you over for running a red light. Bandura’s (1999) criticism of the traditional approach to personality is that asking people to describe who they are is not reasonable when they are in fact different people in different situations.

Albert Bandura’s Theory of Self-Efficacy

Bandura (1977) described self-efficacy as our sense of our own capacity to handle the situation we are in. Situations that challenge us, but that we successfully manage or overcome, build our sense of self-efficacy over time, while situations that we have struggled to handle undermine our sense of self-efficacy. Our self-efficacy in any moment in turn informs our behavior: If we believe things will go well, we are likely to take action, but if we doubt our own abilities, we may refrain from taking action.

Albert Bandura and Observational Learning

Bandura believed that observational learning was something humans did particularly well (Bandura, 1989). Whether or not we are consciously aware of it, we are always learning by observing. And quite importantly, Bandura pointed out that learning by observing can be much more effective and efficient than learning through the trial and error of doing. Think about how much learning now happens over TikTok and YouTube; I can learn to greet you in a language I’ve never heard before simply because I have access to video of a person speaking it.

Albert Bandura and Reciprocal Determinism

Bandura (1989) saw our actions, our thoughts, and the environment as having reciprocal impacts on each other. In other words, not only does my environment influence what I choose to do, but my actions influence my environment. His theory of reciprocal determinism helped move psychological theory beyond unidirectional approaches, such as the behaviorist idea that the only direction of influence is that of behaviors being shaped by environments.

Albert Bandura’s Contributions to Behaviorism

Bandura (1974) himself described his contributions to behaviorism as efforts to critique and move forward theories of behaviorism. Primarily, he advocated for far more consideration of social contexts and cognition. He argued that behavior cannot be understood without considering these other factors. For example, it turns out that environments do influence behaviors, but they do so in part by influencing our thinking. Bandura saw his contributions as empowering people by sending the message that we are not simply creatures being shaped by our environments.

Albert Bandura on Human Agency

Bandura (1999) took a very positive view of human agency. He believed we do not simply respond to the world around us but also actively explore our environments. For example, his theories emphasize that when people feel a strong sense of self-efficacy in a particular situation, they will proactively engage with and change those environments.

Albert Bandura Quotes

  • “People's beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failure; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.”
  • “If efficacy beliefs always reflected only what people can do routinely they would rarely fail, but they would not set aspirations beyond their immediate reach nor mount the extra effort needed to surpass their ordinary performances.”
  • “In the past, modeling influences were largely confined to the styles of behavior and social practices in one's immediate community. The advent of television vastly expanded the range of models to which members of society are exposed day in and day out.”
  • “Success and failure are largely self-defined in terms of personal standards. The higher the self-standards, the more likely will given attainments be viewed as failures, regardless of what others might think.”
  • “Learning would be exceedingly laborious if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do.”
  • “People who perceive themselves as a highly efficacious act, think, and feel differently from those who perceive themselves as inefficacious. They produce their own future, rather than simply foretell it.”

Articles Related to Albert Bandura

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Albert Bandura

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Albert Bandura​

Albert Bandura’s research and theories powerfully shaped the field of psychology in the 20th century. If you’d like to hear more from the man himself about his thoughts on psychology, I recommend watching this video:

Video: Inside the Psychologist's Studio with Albert Bandura​

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