A Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students: ALBERT BANDURA

By Gale and Cengage

Perfect for research assignments in psychology, science, and history, this concise study guide is a one-stop source for in-depth coverage of major psychological theories and the people who developed them. Consistently formatted entries typically cover the following: biographical sketch and personal data, theory outline, analysis of psychologist's place in history, summary of critical response to the theory, the theory in action, and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jan 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535831499

Book preview

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BIOGRAPHY

Growing up in a remote village in Canada, Bandura attended a small school where teachers and textbooks were in short supply. Perhaps because of these limitations, Bandura became a self-motivated and independent learner. His curiosity and independence would serve him well throughout a long and productive career.

Childhood in Canada

Bandura was born on December 4, 1925, the youngest child and the only boy of six children. His parents were both immigrants who had come to Canada from Eastern Europe as adolescents. His mother was originally from the Ukraine, and his father, from Poland. Neither had a formal education, but they valued learning highly. For example, Bandura’s father taught himself to read three languages: Polish, Russian, and German.

Bandura grew up in Mundare, a tiny community in northern Alberta, Canada, about 50 miles (80 km) east of Edmonton. There, he attended the only school in town. The little school was woefully short on both teachers and supplies. Two teachers taught all the high school classes, and the high school math class had only a single textbook for everyone, including the teacher, to share. As a result, the students were left largely to their own devices. One might expect that this situation would produce students who were illprepared for the larger world. Instead, it seems to have pushed the students to take charge of their own educations, and many of them went on to attend universities around the globe. As Bandura was later quoted on an Emory University Web site in his honor, The content of most textbooks is perishable, but the tools of self-directedness serve one well over time.

The college years

When it came time for college, Bandura headed for the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Once there, he stumbled onto psychology by chance. Bandura was carpooling to school with a group of other students who were early risers. He signed up for an introductory psychology class just to fill the early morning time slot, but he quickly became fascinated with the subject. Within three years, in 1949, he had graduated with a prize in psychology. Years later, Bandura discussed how personal actions often place people in situations where fortunate events can then shape the future course of their lives.

For graduate school, Bandura settled on the University of Iowa. At the time, the psychology department there was a hotbed of research and scholarly activity. Among the distinguished faculty members were Kenneth Spence and Kurt Lewin. Spence was known for his research on learning and conditioning. Earlier, Spence had studied with Clark Hull, a leading figure in behaviorism, a school of psychology that posits that organisms can be trained, or conditioned, to respond in specific ways to specific stimuli. At Iowa, Spence extended Hull’s theories and research in an effort to come up with a precise mathematical formula to describe the learning of behavior. The two men’s research on learning became known collectively as the Hull-Spence theory.

Lewin, on the other hand, had a rather different approach to the study of human behavior—an approach he called field theory. Lewin held that a person’s behavior arises from complex interactions among psychological factors inside the person, environmental factors outside the person, and the relationship between these inner and outer worlds. Lewin proposed his field theory as a method for analyzing these kinds of causal relationships.

It must have been a very exciting time and place for Bandura. As he later recalled in a book by Richard Evans:

I found Iowa to be intellectually lively, but also very supportive. . .At Iowa we were imprinted early on a model of scholarship that combined high respect for theory linked to venturesome research. It was an excellent beginning for a career.

Bandura also found time for nonacademic interests. One day, while golfing with a friend, he found himself playing behind a pair of female golfers. Eventually, he wound up in a sand trap with one of the women, Virginia Varns, who was on the teaching staff at the College of Nursing. The two struck up an acquaintance that blossomed into a lifelong romance. Bandura and Varns were married in 1952, the same year Bandura finished his PhD in clinical psychology. The couple went on to have two daughters: Mary, born in 1954, and Carol, born in 1958.

Career at Stanford

In 1953, Bandura took a job as an instructor in the psychology department at Stanford University. He has remained at Stanford ever since, becoming a full professor in 1964. In 1974, Stanford awarded Bandura an endowed chair, a high honor in the academic world, and he became the David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology. The intellectual climate at Stanford has served Bandura well, providing eminent colleagues and bright students with whom to conduct research and exchange ideas.

Perhaps the first prominent colleague to influence Bandura at Stanford was Robert Sears, who was chairman of the psychology department when Bandura arrived. Among other things, Sears was studying child-rearing patterns that led to aggressiveness and dependency in children. Following this line of work, Bandura and his first graduate student, Richard Walters, began studying the family backgrounds of very aggressive delinquents. They discovered that one factor affecting aggression among teenagers was whether or not the teens’ parents were hostile or aggressive. In 1959, Bandura and Walters published a book titled Adolescent Aggression, which described their research on this subject.

Bandura was struck by the seeming influence of parental role models on teenagers’ aggressive behavior. He wanted to study this effect in more depth experimentally, but first he had to come up with a workable study design. The result was the now-famous Bobo doll experiments, which Bandura conducted with Dorothea Ross and Sheila Ross. In 1963, the findings from this research were summarized in a second book with Walters, titled Social Learning and Personality Development. Few areas of psychological research have ever captured the public imagination as well as the Bobo doll studies did. As Bandura told Evans, When I’m introduced at invited lectures at other universities, the students place a Bobo doll by the lectern. From time to time I have been asked to autograph one. The Bobo doll has achieved stardom in psychological circles.

Of course, it was