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As a result, Bandura has achieved one of the highest citation indexes in the field of education as well as psychology (e.g., Gorden, et al., 1984). The ...
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Albert Bandura: The Man and his Contributions to Educational Psychology Barry J. Zimmerman and Dale H. Schunk
This chapter was published in B. J. Zimmerman & D. H. Schunk, (Eds.), Educational psychology: One-hundred years of contributions. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum.
In June 1993, Albert Bandura’s colleagues and former students surprised him by gathering in California’s verdant Napa Valley for a two-day Bandurafest. Months of secretive planning behind his back had eluded his typically observant eye, and he came to the event under a cover story. That so many people attended the gathering may seem remarkable because no papers were presented and no Festschrift publication was planned. Instead, the two days were spent in lively informal discussions, a delightful picnic in the vineyards amidst the noble grapes, and a joyous celebratory dinner. The primary reason that people came from near and far was to honor their esteemed mentor, colleague, and friend. He was affectionately described as the "jovial genius" by one of his former students for his wisdom, humility, and wonderful sense of humor. In this intimate gathering, joined by his wife Ginny and his daughters Mary and Carol, Al expressed his gratitude to everyone present and others who could not attend for enriching his life. In this chapter we attempt to recapture the spirit of the Bandurafest by reviewing Al’s life and contributions to the study of human behavior. Although he was trained as a clinical psychologist, his theories and research have had broad impact on many disciplines, especially educational psychology. The Man Albert Bandura was born on December 4, 1925 in Mundare, a hamlet in northern Alberta, Canada, which is located about 50 miles east of Edmonton. He has described the forbidding climate of his northern Alberta home humorously as the birthplace of widely feared arctic cold fronts that sweep out of Canada into the United States (Stokes, 1986a). He was the youngest child and only boy among six children in a family of Ukrainian descent. Interestingly, the name bandura refers to a Ukrainian 60-stringed musical instrument, and for Al, portended a lifelong love of classical music. His unique early education experiences would prove formative to his subsequent view of learning as an essentially social and self-directed experience. His entire pre-collegiate education was
potatoes and sugar, but on one occasion, several resident grizzly bears arrived before the enterprising distillers and devoured their alcoholic mash, which was much more zestful than berries. Needless to say there was much despondency among the men but great frolicking among the bears! The humor and yet pathos of these social learning experiences left an indelible mark on Bandura's understanding of the human condition -- an enduring appreciation for the value of human agency, even among the dispossessed, in a world of real consequences. To escape the severe weather of northern Alberta, Bandura enrolled in 1946 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, which enjoys a mild Pacific coastal climate and a fine intellectual reputation. Upon entering the university, Al did not intend to study psychology, but fortuitously, he rode to school in a carpool with several engineering and pre-med students who had enrolled in early morning classes. He decided to register for a psychology course to fill this early time slot, and became so fascinated by the topic, he decided to pursue it as a major. He was a exemplary student who graduated in just three years with the Bolocan Award in psychology. The impact of his accidental entrance into the world of psychology would influence his theorizing later. In the seminal article “The Psychology of Chance Encounters and Life Paths,” he (Bandura, 1982) discussed how personal initiative often places people into circumstances where fortuitous events can shape the courses lives take. Rather than treating fortuity as uncontrollability, Bandura focused on how to make chance work for one through self-development to exploit fortuitous opportunities. For graduate study, Bandura sought the "stone tablets" of psychology, which he was advised resided in the University of Iowa. In the early 1950s, Iowa had such stellar faculty as Kenneth Spence and Kurt Lewin, and the intellectual environment was lively with high quality research and debate. It was also the scene of occasional clever pranks designed to raise Spence's blood pressure, such as when the graduate students pinned a rat that had expired on the Departmental bulletin board
with an explanatory note, "This rat ran according to Tolman's theory" (Hilgard, 1989, p. 4). When Spence spied the rodent, he snatched it away with an explosive expletive. Because of a close allegiance between Spence and Clark Hull at Yale University, students and faculty at Iowa followed theory and research at Yale closely. In the 1930s, social learning theory was born at the Yale Institute of Human Relations under the direction of Mark May with the intellectual leadership of Hull. They sought to provide learning explanations for key aspects of personality and social development discussed by Freud, such as dependency, aggression, identification, conscience formation, and defense mechanisms. Among the key collaborators with Hull at the institute were John Dollard, Neal Miller, and Robert Sears, who sought to reconcile Freudian and Hullian perspectives during their subsequent careers. For example, to study the cause of children's identification with adults, Miller and Dollard conducted a series of experimental studies of social modeling, which they described as a form of instrumental conditioning in a book entitled Social Learning and Imitation (1941). Despite Spence's missionary zeal at Iowa, Bandura was not attracted to Hullian theory because of its emphasis on tedious trial-and-error learning. He felt that cultures transmitted social mores and complex competencies primarily through vicarious experience and that Miller and Dollard's studies of modeling and imitation revealed an alternative way that humans acquired competences and knowledge. While Bandura was engaged in his graduate study at Iowa, another pivotal event in his life resulted from a chance encounter. As he explained: Seeking relief from an uninspiring reading assignment, a graduate student departs for the golf links with his friend. They happen to find themselves playing behind a twosome of attractive women golfers. Before long the two twosomes become one foursome and, in the course of
son be tough, that he settle disputes with peers physically if necessary, and they sided with their son against the school. They would go to school and become very aggressive toward the school system and toward peers that were giving their son a tough time. The youngsters modeled the aggressive hostile attitudes of their parents" (Hilgard, 1989, p. 11). Clearly, the vicarious influence of seeing a model meting out punishment outweighed the suppressive effect of receiving punishment directly for aggressive acts. These findings conflicted with the Freudian-Hullian assumption that direct parental punishment would internally inhibit children's expression of aggressive drives. These results led Bandura to conduct a program of research with Dorrie and Sheila Ross on social modeling involving the now famous inflated plastic Bobo doll. At that time, it was widely believed in accordance with the Freudian theory of catharsis that modeled violence would drain observers’ aggressive drives and reduce such behavior. The children in these studies were exposed to social models who demonstrated either novel violent or nonviolent behaviors toward these rebounding dolls (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961, 1963). Children who viewed violent models subsequently displayed the novel forms of aggression toward the Bobo doll whereas control children rarely, if ever, did so. These results revealed the occurrence of observational learning in the absence of reinforcement to the observers. Bandura and his colleagues also demonstrated that children could learn new patterns of behavior vicariously without actually performing them or receiving rewards. This line of theorizing was discordant with the views in vogue at the time that learning is a consequence of direct reinforcement. The results conflicted with Miller and Dollard's (1941) conditioning account of modeling and imitation, and led Bandura to distinguish between the cognitive effects of modeling on acquisition and the motivational effects of rewards on imitative performance. This research was summarized in a second book published in 1963 entitled Social
Learning and Personality Development and led Bandura and Walters to conclude that modeling was a powerful process that could account for diverse forms of learning. They sought to free explanations of social learning from theoretical dependence on Freudian assumptions about the role of identification and catharsis and from Hullian and Skinnerian assumptions about the need for direct reinforcement. During the 1960s, Bandura launched a second major program of research on children's development of self-regulatory capabilities. This research foreshadowed his development of an agentic perspective in which people are viewed as self-regulatory and self-reflective organisms, not just reactive ones to environmental influences. Bandura explored with his student Carol Kupers (1964) the acquisition of performance standards for self-reward. They used a bowling game wherein children could reward themselves with candy for whatever performance level they felt merited the reward. Children watched an adult or peer model bowl and reward himself according to either a high or a low performance standard. When the children had an opportunity to bowl, those who witnessed a model set a high standard of self-reward adopted a more stringent performance criterion for self-reward than observers who watched a model set a lax standard. In a related study, children who were given high performance standards achieved more due to self-rewards than to external rewards (Bandura & Perloff, 1967). Bandura and a colleague at Stanford, Walter Mischel, found that children who observed a model forego small immediate rewards in favor of larger long- term rewards increased their preference for delayed rewards (Bandura & Mischel, 1965). These pioneering studies of the social origins of children's self-motivation and self- regulation provided a new and experimentally testable alternative to personality trait theories. The role of a person's situational context would become a major focus of Mischel's (1968) subsequent research on a wide variety of personal attributes, such as conscientiousness and friendliness, and
mimicry of a model’s specific behaviors. This series of studies included stringent transfer tests of observational learning. In Bandura's book, Principles of Behavior Modification (1969), he noted that evidence of transfer showed observers responded to new stimulus situations in a manner consistent with the model's dispositions even though they never witnessed the model's response to the same stimuli. By inducing rules underlying modeling exemplars, observers could create novel but rule-consistent sequences that extended beyond what was seen or heard. Modeling could also lead to divergent forms of abstraction, such as when brain storming by a model led observers to think unconventionally (Arem & Zimmerman, 1977; Harris & Evans, 1973; Harris & Fisher, 1973; Zimmerman & Dialessi, 1975). This evidence of abstract modeling freed social learning accounts from the shackles of narrow conceptions based on behavioral mimicry of a model. These empirical demonstrations of the effect of abstract modeling on children’s moral judgments, linguistic rules, and conceptual styles of inquiry attracted many adherents who were looking for alternatives to stage views of children's development. The impact of this initial research on abstract modeling of conceptual or linguistic rules was reviewed in the edited book entitled Psychological Modeling -- Conflicting Theories (Bandura, 1971). Bandura's discussion of the role of abstract modeling in the observers' formation and use of symbolic processes stimulated a wave of successful training studies during the 1970s on diverse aspects of children's cognitive and linguistic functioning that challenged stage conceptions of development (Bandura, 1977; Rosenthal & Zimmerman, 1978; Zimmerman & Rosenthal, 1974). To further understand the process of abstraction in vicarious learning, Bandura investigated the impact of observers' symbolic coding of modeling events (Bandura & Jeffrey, 1973). Symbolic coding greatly enhanced observational acquisition of complex patterns of motor behavior. Clearly
the quality of observers' learning from a model was affected by their cognitive or linguistic facility. Bandura (1986) described the role of this symbolic capacity of learners in the following way, "Through their capacity to manipulate symbols and to engage in reflective thought, people can generate novel ideas and innovative actions that transcend their past experiences" (p. 1182). Through advances in the technology of telecommunications during the latter part of the Twentieth Century, symbolic modeling is playing a paramount role in the worldwide diffusion of ideas, values, and styles of behavior. Despite differences in place and local time, learners can symbolically encode vicarious experience to better understand and transform their environments. Bandura put it this way, "Most of the images of reality on which we based our actions are really based on vicarious experience... We have a vast new world of images brought into our sitting- rooms electronically" (Stokes, 1986a, p. 3). Through symbolic modeling, people give structure, meaning, and continuity to their lives. In 1974, Bandura unexpectedly received a letter from the American Psychological Association (APA) informing him that he had been nominated for the office of the Presidency. Because he had very little contact with the organization and its politics, he viewed the whole matter as an amusing fluke -- his fifteen minutes of Andy Warholian fame with low risk of election. However, one Saturday, he was in the upper reaches of a mulberry tree in his yard pruning and trimming the branches when he received a phone call came from APA headquarters. When Bandura picked up the receiver, the executive director greeted him with terse announcement, "Well, you're it!" Later Bandura described his selection to the Presidency humorously as "the most rapid evolutionary descent on record from the trees into an organizational board room" (Hilgard, 1989, p. 15). During Bandura's term of office, American psychologists were threatened by cuts in training grants by the Nixon administration, by cuts in reimbursements for psychological treatment for
Bandura's research on self-regulation and self-efficacy culminated in a 1977 book entitled Social Learning Theory, in which he analyzed human learning and self-regulation in terms of triadic reciprocal causations involving a complex interplay between personal (cognitive- affective), behavioral, and environmental determinants (see Figure 1). "Perceived self-efficacy not only reduces anticipatory fears and inhibitions but, through expectations of eventual success, it affects coping efforts once they are initiated. Efficacy expectations determine how much effort people will expend, and how long they will persist in the face of obstacles and aversive experiences. The stronger the efficacy or mastery expectations, the more active the efforts" (Bandura, 1977, p. 80). Bandura (1986, p. 25) summarized this triadic perspective as follows, "What people think, believe, and feel affects how they behave. The natural and extrinsic effects of their actions, in turn, partly determine their thought patterns and affective reactions." This formulation avoided the pitfalls of classical cognitive approaches (Sampson, 1980), which minimized the interactive role of one's behavior and social environmental context on human thought. During the 1980s, Bandura increasingly turned his attention to studying the impact of self- efficacy beliefs in new areas of functioning. With his student Dale Schunk, he investigated the self- regulatory effects of personal goal setting during children's mastery of mathematical competencies that had eluded them (Bandura & Schunk, 1981). They discovered that students who set proximal personal goals (i.e., completing a certain number of problems during each study session) developed higher self-efficacy, intrinsic interest, and competency than students who pursued only distal goals or no goals. Bandura shifted his program of research to shed light on the self-efficacy belief system: its origins, structures, and functions, diverse effects, and how this knowledge could be used for personal and social benefit. He viewed perceived efficacy as the foundation of human motivation and action.
This research on self-regulatory processes, such as goal setting and self-efficacy beliefs, led Bandura to integrate his earlier modeling research with his later research on the role of self-referent thought in a 1986 book entitled Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. At the time, Bandura decided to re-label his theoretical approach as social cognitive because he felt the breadth of his theorizing and research had expanded beyond the scope of the social learning label. Moreover, the label had become increasingly misleading because it applied to several theories founded on dissimilar tenets, such as Miller and Dollard's drive theory, Rotter's (1966) expectancy theory, and Gewirtz's (1971) operant theory. In this book, Bandura presented a social cognitive vision of the origins of human thought and action and the influential role of self-referential processes to motivation, affect, and action. He depicted people as self- organizing, proactive, self-reflective, and self-regulative in thought and action rather than as merely reactive to social environmental or inner cognitive-affective forces. During the 1990s, Bandura undertook a series of studies of the interactive influences of families, peers, and schools on children’s development of self-efficacy and its impact on developmental trajectories. "The capabilities of self-influence are developed, one is not born with them. They are developed by mastering experience, by modeling, and by what people persuade us we can or cannot do" (Stokes, 1986a, p. 3). In research with Barry Zimmerman and Manual Martinez-Pons, he discovered that students' self-efficacy beliefs about regulating their academic learning activities and writing were highly predictive of their academic goal setting and achievement (Zimmerman, Bandura, & Martinez-Pons, 1992; Zimerman & Bandura, 1994). The inclusion of perceived self-efficacy in path models increased prediction of students' academic achievement by more than 30 percent while controlling for their prior grades or performance on standardized achievement tests. Working with Claudio Barbarelli, Gian Vittorio Caprara, and
His Contributions to Human Development and Education It should come as no surprise to readers to learn the impact of Bandura's own program of research represents only a small part of his enormous influence in psychology and education. Apart from his own research, he exerted major impact through his modeling and writing on the collective efforts of his many colleagues, students, and followers. His immense secondary impact stems from the compelling quality of his theory and its ready social applicability. Readers are attracted to his theorizing because they can apply his constructs and methods to a wide range of pursuits that contribute to scientific progress. As a result, Bandura has achieved one of the highest citation indexes in the field of education as well as psychology (e.g., Gorden, et al., 1984). The sections that follow illustrate the ways in which his research and writing profoundly altered educators' methods of instruction and view of students' development. Understanding Children's Social Development. Before Bandura began his seminal research, educators' conceptions of students' aggression were dominated by the Freudian view that such behavior was the product of intrapsychic forces operating largely unconsciously. Students' aggression on the playground or in school was seen as a recurring expression of underlying impulses requiring release in minimally detrimental ways. Teachers and societal leaders who looked to psychologists for guidance in these matters received much misleading advice. In the early 1960s, the story lines in television programs and motion pictures became more violent, and network executives and movie producers defended this fare as socially beneficial by citing the Freudian theory of catharsis. Bandura's Bobo doll experiments disputed these claims, revealing instead the power of televised or filmed violence on children's aggressive proclivities. His pioneering studies led in considerable part to the U.S. Surgeon General's commissioning of a panel to evaluate the research in this area (Comstock & Rubinstein, 1972). The report acknowledged the
adverse effects of televised violence and the conditions governing the magnitude of that impact The Bobo doll studies have achieved continuing fame because photographs of the modeling effects are included in introductory psychology books and virtually all undergraduates enroll in the introductory course. This high visibility would, on one occasion, merit Bandura a substantial room upgrade in a Washington D.C. hotel when the clerk at the registration clerk discovered that the father of the Bobo doll studies was registering for the night. Clearly paternity has its benefits! Bandura's modeling research also showed how social modeling could be used to diminish aggression and promote prosocial functioning and foster adoption of moral standards for judging moral dilemmas. Bandura and his colleagues also showed how children could be taught prosocial behavior, such as empathy, sharing, and altruism, through modeling (Bandura & Rosenthal, 1966; Harris, 1968; Rosenhan & White, 1967; Zimmerman & Brody, 1975). In 1973, Bandura published Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis in which he compared social learning and alternative theories and discussed their implications for social policy and management of schools' social environments. Many current violence prevention programs in the schools are based on social modeling and self-regulatory principles. Much of theorizing regarding students' aggression and its prevention has focused on the role of moral thought but has neglected the issue of moral conduct. Bandura has suggested that students' moral conduct is embedded in their capability to self-regulate. That is, students monitor their conduct and the conditions under which it occurs, judge it in relation to their moral standards and perceived circumstances, and regulate their actions by the consequences they apply to themselves. They do things that give them a sense of self-worth. They refrain from behaving in ways that violate their moral standards because such conduct brings self-condemnation. However, it is well known
regulating their conduct play an important role in moral behavior. In studies conducted in Italy, Bandura, Bararanelli, Caprara, and Pastorelli (1996b) found that low self-regulatory efficacy increased students' readiness to disengage their moral standards. In subsequent research (Bandura, Caprara, Bararanelli, Pastorelli, and Regalia, 2001), students' perceived academic and self- regulatory efficacy concurrently and longitudinally deterred transgressions both directly and by fostering prosocial behavior and adherence to moral self-sanctions for harmful conduct. As expected, moral disengagement led to greater transgressions over time. Interestingly, prosocial behavior, such as cooperating, helping, sharing, and consoling, was highly predictive of not only social preferences by peers but also students' academic achievement in school (Caprara, Bararanelli, Pastorelli, Bandura, and Zimbardo, 2000). Teachers and peers are attracted to prosocial children and provide greater academic support and guidance to these youngsters. It appears that prosocial students proactively create an enduring personal social environment that is conducive to their subsequent academic learning. Educators' views of children's pro-social and antisocial functioning have been profoundly influenced by Bandura's research and writing. There is now widespread awareness that modeling experiences and self-efficacy and self-regulatory processes greatly influence children's coping with conflict, frustration, academic stressors, and failure. Understanding children's cognitive development. Educators' conceptions of children's cognitive and linguistic development during the 1960s and 1970s were greatly influenced by stage views. Piaget, Kohlberg and Chomsky each made strong maturational assumptions about children's development and were generally constrictive about efforts to teach stage-related skills precociously, except perhaps during brief periods of stage transition. Some educators believed it unwise to teach abstract mathematical concepts to preschoolers because of their limited preoperational level of
reasoning, and other educators believed that efforts to teach higher ethical reasoning to young children would be unsuccessful because of their stage-related egocentrism. Bandura and his colleagues challenged these stage views as unduly pessimistic and insensitive to the role of social and cultural learning experiences in children's development "Most developmental models of human behavior presuppose a developmental predeterminism in which childhood experiences pretty much set the course of later development" (Stokes, 1986a, p. 2). "Stage theories have at best specified only vaguely the conditions that lead to changes in behavior from one level to another" (Bandura & Walters, 1963, p. 25). To address these issues, social learning researchers conducted numerous abstract modeling studies to demonstrate the acquisition of higher-order competencies (Zimmerman & Rosenthal, 1974). More specifically, they questioned claims that children (a) displayed homogeneous stage functioning across tasks and situational contexts and (b) could not be taught Piagetian concepts, grammatical rules, and Kohlbergian or Piagetian moral judgments precociously. Mary Harris, Robert Liebert, Ted Rosenthal, James Sherman, Grover Whitehurst, and Barry Zimmerman among many others, used abstract modeling to teach advanced stage functioning among children of a variety of ages (Rosenthal & Zimmerman, 1978). Although age-related shifts in children’s functioning were of interest to Bandura and his colleagues, they showed these outcomes were influenced by changes in social learning experience, hierarchies of goals and knowledge, and motoric competence. They cautioned educators that shifts in children's functioning at the approximate ages of two, seven, and 12 years emphasized by stage theories are better predicted by social learning experiences and accomplishments, such as the acquisition of speech and mobility, entrance into school, and the experiences associated with the onset of puberty. Regarding later life-span development, Bandura (1982, 1998) emphasized pivotal adult life path experiences like his own in education, marriage, and employment rather than developmental stage
