Albert Bandura (December 4, 1925 – July 26, 2021) was a Canadian-American psychologist and professor of social science in psychology at Stanford University, who contributed to the fields of education and to the fields of psychology (e.g., social cognitive theory, therapy, and personality psychology), and influenced the transition between behaviorism and cognitive psychology. Bandura also is known as the originator of social learning theory, social cognitive theory, and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy. He was responsible for the theoretically influential Bobo doll experiment (1961), which demonstrated the conceptual validity of observational learning, wherein children would observe an adult act either aggressively or neutrally toward a doll, and, having learned through observation, were more likely to also beat the doll if they had witnessed the aggressive behavior.
A 2002 survey ranked Bandura as the fourth most frequently cited psychologist of all time, behind B. F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Piaget. In April 2025, Bandura became the first psychologist with more than a million Google Scholar citations. During his lifetime, Bandura was widely described as the greatest living psychologist, and as one of the most influential psychologists of all time.
Bandura was born in Mundare, Alberta, an open town of roughly 400 inhabitants, as the youngest of six children. The limitations of education in his remote town caused Bandura to become independent and self-motivated in terms of learning, and the primarily-developed traits proved helpful later in his career. Bandura was of Polish and Ukrainian descent; his father was from Kraków, Poland, while his mother was from Ukraine.
Bandura's parents were a key influence in encouraging him to seek ventures out of the small hamlet they resided in. The summer after finishing high school, Bandura worked in the Yukon to protect the Alaska Highway against sinking. Bandura later credited his work in the northern tundra as the origin of his interest in human psychopathology. His experience in the Yukon, where he was exposed to a subculture of drinking and gambling, helped broaden his perspective and scope of views on life.
Bandura arrived in the United States in 1949 and was naturalized in 1956. He married Virginia Varns (1921–2011) in 1952, and they raised two daughters, Carol and Mary.
Bandura took psychology courses in college and became passionate about the subject. He graduated after three years in 1949 with a B.A. from the University of British Columbia, winning the Bolocan Award in psychology, and then moved to the then-epicenter of psychology, the University of Iowa, from where he obtained his M.A. in 1951 and Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1952. Arthur Benton was his academic adviser at Iowa, giving Bandura a direct academic descent from William James, while Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence were influential collaborators.
During his Iowa years, Bandura came to support an approach to psychology research that sought to investigate psychological phenomena through repeatable, experimental testing. His inclusion of such mental phenomena as imagery and representation, and his concept of reciprocal determinism, which postulated a relationship of mutual influence between an agent and its environment, marked a radical departure from the dominant behaviorism of the time. Bandura's expanded array of conceptual tools allowed for more potent modeling of such phenomena as observational learning and self-regulation, and provided psychologists with a practical way in which to theorize about mental processes, in opposition to the mentalistic constructs of psychoanalysis and personality psychology.
Upon graduation, he completed his postdoctoral internship at the Wichita Guidance Center. The following year, 1953, he accepted a teaching position at Stanford University, which he held until he became professor emeritus in 2010. In 1974, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA), the world's largest association of psychologists. Bandura would later state the only reason he agreed to be in the running for the APA election was because he wanted his 15 minutes of fame without any intentions of being elected. He also worked as a sports coach.
Bandura was initially influenced by Robert Sears' work on familial antecedents of social behavior and identificatory learning and gave up his research of the psychoanalytic theory. He directed his initial research to the role of social modeling in human motivation, thought, and action. In collaboration with Richard Walters, his first doctoral student, he engaged in studies of social learning and aggression. Their joint efforts illustrated the critical role of modeling in human behavior and led to a program of research into the determinants and mechanisms of observational learning.
The initial phase of Bandura's research analyzed the foundations of human learning and the willingness of children and adults to imitate behavior that they observed in other people, particularly the emotion of aggression. The research pointed to modeling as an important means for learning new behaviors and for achieving behavioral change in an institutional setting.
Social learning theory posits three regulatory systems that control human behavior:
The antecedent inducements greatly influence the time and response of behavior. The stimulus that occurs before the behavioral response must be appropriate in relation to the social context and the performers of the behavior.
Response and feedback influences have an important function. Following a response to a stimulus, the reinforcements, either by experience or by observation, will determine future occurrences of the behavior.
Cognitive functions are important in social learning. For example, for aggressive behavior to occur, some people are readily angered by the sight or the thought of persons with whom they had hostile encounters, and that aggression-inducing memory is learned.
Social learning theory became one of the theoretical frameworks for Entertainment-Education, a method of creating socially beneficial entertainment pioneered by Miguel Sabido. Bandura and Sabido went on to forge a close relationship and further refine the theory and practice.
His research with Walters led to Bandura's first book, Adolescent Aggression (1959), followed by Social Learning and Personality Development (1963), and Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis (1973). During a period dominated by behaviorism in the mold of B.F. Skinner, Bandura believed the sole behavioral modifiers of reward and punishment used in classical and operant conditioning were inadequate as a framework, and that many human behaviors were learned from other humans.
Bandura began to analyze approaches for treating unduly aggressive children by identifying sources of violence in their lives. Initial research in the area had begun in the 1940s under Neal Miller and John Dollard. Bandura's continued work in this area eventually culminated in the Bobo doll experiment, which led to his 1977 treatise, Social Learning Theory. Many of his innovations came from his focus on empirical investigation and reproducible investigation, in contrast to Sigmund Freud's popular theories of psychoanalysis. In 1974, Stanford University awarded him an endowed chair and he became David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology.
In 1961, Bandura conducted a controversial experiment known as the Bobo doll experiment, which was designed to show that similar behaviors were learned by individuals shaping their own behavior after the actions of models. The experiment emphasized how young individuals are influenced by the acts of adults. When the adults were praised for their aggressive behavior, the children were more likely to keep on hitting the doll. However, when the adults were punished, they consequently stopped hitting the doll as well. Bandura's results from the experiment were widely credited with helping shift the focus in academic psychology from pure behaviorism to cognitive psychology.