Albert Bandura
Background
Albert Bandura was born December 4, 1925 in Mundare, Alberta. He was the youngest child in a family of 6. He came to the United States in 1949, where he married Virginia Varns and raised 2 daughers. Bandura graduated with a B.A. from the University of British Colombia and won the Bolocan Award in psychology. After, he moved to the University of Iowa and got his M.A. and Ph.D in Psychology. After graduation, he participated in a clinical internship with the Wichita Kansas Guidance Center and later took a teaching job at Stanford in 1953, where he still teaches. In 1974, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association.
Bandura's Contributions to Psychology
Albert Bandura directed his research towards social modeling in human motivation, thought, and action. He also studied social learning and aggression with Richard Walters. The two started a research program to further research observational learning. They created the Social Learning Theory, which states that models are an important source for learning new behaviors and for achieving behavioral change. This research led Bandura to write his first 2 books, Adolescent Aggression and Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis. He was the first to test the Bobo Doll experiment, which emphasized that children are greatly influenced by the actions of adults. In 1974, Stanford awarded him the position of David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology. He later launched a major research program which researched the role of self-referent thought in psychological functioning. His research helped people overcome their distress and trauma and to move forward. He contributed to research on phobias and trauma with his research on self-efficacy.