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Albert Bandura, who was originally trained as a behaviorist, became discontented with behaviorism because it is difficult or impossible to identify either stimuli or reinforcements for the entire range of human behavior (Pajares & Schunk, 2002). Bandura (1986) proposed that, in addition to classical and operant conditioning, people can learn new behaviors simply by watching others and imitating them rather than by receiving direct reinforcement of their own behaviors. He initially called his theory a social learning theory because the learning occurs from watching other people (social).

Albert Bandura. Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory contributed the idea that people learn new behaviors by watching and imitating them rather than being directly reinforced.

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Bandura’s earliest work showed how children learn by direct observation. In his classic experiment, one group of children observed an adult in a video act aggressively to a Bobo doll (a large inflated figure of a clown that is weighted on the bottom), hitting it, kicking it, throwing it, and striking it with a toy hammer (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963). These children and another group of children who had not seen the video were then brought individually into a room containing the Bobo doll and other toys. The children who had seen the adult attacking the Bobo doll were much more likely to imitate the adult’s violent behavior in the video. In contrast, the children who hadn’t seen the adult model attacking the Bobo doll were less likely to carry out these aggressive acts. Bandura concluded that observing a model may provoke a more generalized response based on the children’s understanding of what was happening. In this case, they may have specifically seen the adult hit the Bobo doll, but they also understood that the generalized idea was to be aggressive to the doll.

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Bandura’s experiment on modeling. What did this boy and girl learn by watching the adult in the film shown in the top row?

Albert Bandura

Bandura later placed greater emphasis on the cognitive, or thinking, aspects of behavior development and specifically on thinking about our own ability to have control in our lives. He renamed his theory social cognitive theory to emphasize that thought has social origins but is then processed through our own cognitive interpretations.