Theories of Social Learning, Self Efficacy, & Personality​

To psychologist Albert Bandura, one of the most famous social psychologists of all time, my learning of this relationship behavior would make perfect sense. I had learned how to be a partner in part from watching my dad—my main male role model—be a partner to my mom. So although conflict was rarely big or painful in my family growing up, I had still adopted the same defensive physical stance my dad took when things got hard at home. Keeping this example in mind, let’s look at the life and accomplishments of Albert Bandura to better understand how his work shaped the field of psychology, and social psychology in particular.​

Funnily enough, Bandura entered the field of psychology out of boredom: He had mornings open one semester and decided to fill the time with a psychology course. He became a star psychology student at the University of British Columbia and transitioned immediately into graduate school, earning a PhD in psychology from the University of Iowa in just three years. 

Even as a graduate student, Bandura was innovative (Bandura & Evans, 2006). The behaviorist approach, which argued that behaviors were the only really meaningful psychological phenomena to study, was the prevailing theory of the time. Bandura tried to make his experiments focus not just on behavior but on mental processes as well. In other words, he believed from early on that mental processes and behaviors interacted with each other; this core belief would influence his work throughout his career.​

Bandura began teaching psychology and conducting research at Stanford University shortly after getting his PhD, and he remained there for the duration of his professional career. In fact, he died in Stanford in 2021, at the ripe old age of 95.

Bandura proposed that we could learn quite effectively without getting punished ourselves; instead, simply seeing other people have the experience could provide the learning (Bandura, 1974). He made the point that many of our behaviors do not have immediate, reinforcing consequences. For example, if you plagiarized somebody in writing a class essay, you might not get in trouble until your professor or teacher read the paper, which could be days or weeks later. Bandura (1974) reasoned that we must be capable of thinking ahead and imagining possible outcomes for ourselves, and one way we could gather critical information for this imaginative process was by observing other people in action. To take the example from my childhood, perhaps seeing my preschool teachers scold other children for taking toys without asking was one reason I knew not to take what my sibling was playing with.

Their theory was that children learn by imitation and are influenced by what they see others doing. And sure enough, the children who observed the adult being aggressive toward the doll were much more likely to end up hitting the doll themselves than were the children who observed no aggressive behavior in the experiment.​

These results were provocative for several reasons, but primarily because they demonstrated that children would learn to aggress in a novel environment simply from watching an adult they had just met be aggressive. It was a striking example of how powerful the drive to imitate others can be—especially when there are no apparent negative consequences for potentially damaging behavior.

With social cognitive theory, Bandura formalized many of his key contributions to psychology, such as reciprocal determinism and self-efficacy. (For more on these topics, keep reading.) It combined these ideas into a coherent theory that psychologists could and have tested many times over, finding that many of its core features, when studied together, predict human behavior (e.g., Young et al., 2014).

• “People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failure; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.”
• “If efficacy beliefs always reflected only what people can do routinely they would rarely fail, but they would not set aspirations beyond their immediate reach nor mount the extra effort needed to surpass their ordinary performances.”
• “In the past, modeling influences were largely confined to the styles of behavior and social practices in one’s immediate community. The advent of television vastly expanded the range of models to which members of society are exposed day in and day out.”
• “Success and failure are largely self-defined in terms of personal standards. The higher the self-standards, the more likely will given attainments be viewed as failures, regardless of what others might think.”
• “Learning would be exceedingly laborious if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do.”
• “People who perceive themselves as a highly efficacious act, think, and feel differently from those who perceive themselves as inefficacious. They produce their own future, rather than simply foretell it.”

• Bandura, A. (1974). Behavior theory and the models of man. American Psychologist, 29(12), 859–869.
• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.
• Bandura, A. (1989). Human agency in social cognitive theory. American Psychologist, 44(9), 1175–1184.
• Bandura, A. (1999). A social cognitive theory of personality. In L. Pervin & O. John (Eds.), Handbook of personality (2nd ed., pp. 154–196). Guilford Publications.
• Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, 52(1), 1–26.
• Bandura, A. (2014). Social-cognitive theory. In An introduction to theories of personality (pp. 341–360). Psychology Press.
• Bandura, A., & Evans, R. I. (2006). Albert Bandura. Insight Media.
• Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63(3), 575–582.
• Young, M. D., Plotnikoff, R. C., Collins, C. E., Callister, R., & Morgan, P. J. (2014). Social cognitive theory and physical activity: a systematic review and meta‐analysis. Obesity Reviews, 15(12), 983–995.