Transcript Sociocultural Theory of Learning

Albert Bandura
1925-present
 Born December 4, 1925 in Alberta, Canada
 Education:
 Bachelors degree in Psychology-Univ.of British
Columbia 1949
 University of Iowa-received PH.D 1952
 Postdoctural position at Wichita Guidance Center in
Wichita, KS
 Stanford University- 1953, still teaching there today.
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President of APA – 1973
Received APA’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions 1980
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980.
In 1999 he received the Thorndike Award for Distinguished
Contributions of Psychology to Education from the American
Psychological Association, and in 2001, he received the Lifetime
Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of
Behavior Therapy. He is the recipient of the Outstanding Lifetime
Contribution to Psychology Award from the American Psychological
Association and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Western
Psychological Association, the James McKeen Cattell Award from the
American Psychological Society, and the Gold Medal Award for
Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Psychological Science from the
American Psychological Foundation. In 2008, he received the
Grawemeyer Award for contributions to psychology.
 Took behaviorism to new heights
 Original theory:
 Reciprocal determinism -environment causes
behavior but behavior also causes environment
 Began to look at personality along with environment
and behavior
 Consists of ability to entertain images in our minds
and language
 By adding “imagery” he was able to theorize more
efficiently about observational learning(modeling)
and self-regulation
Certain steps that need to happen for modeling to occur
Attention
 Individual needs to be paying attention for learning
to happen
 Unable to learn if sleepy, drugged, sick, or distracted
by competing stimuli
Retention
 Individual must be able to retain what they paid
attention to
 Storage of what the individual saw the model do in the
form of mental images and verbal descriptions
 When stored – able to bring up the image so that it can
be duplicated in individuals own behavior
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Reproduction
Have to have ability to reproduce the behavior
Improvement of behavior occurs if individual learns
from someone that does it better
Ability improves with practice
Ability improves even if just imagine ourselves
performing well
Motivation
 “Gotta Wanna”
 Motives:
 Past reinforcement- traditional behaviorism
 Promised reinforcements- incentives
 Vicarious reiforcement- seeing and recalling the
model being reinforced
 Other variations of the BoBo Doll studies included
filming of a woman beating up a live clown. When the
children went into the room with the live clown, they
proceeded to hit, kick and use hammers to strike the
clown until they were stopped.
 This aggression again modeled that attention,
reproduction and motivation are needed for learning
to occur.
 Dr. Albert Bandura has had an enormous impact on
personality theory and therapy. His research has been
called the “bridge between behaviorist and cognitive
learning theories because it encompasses attention,
memory, and motivation. The theory is related to
Vygotsky’s Social Development Theory and Lave’s
Situated Learning, which also emphasize the
importance of social learning.”(2)
Dr. Banduras also did extensive research on selfregulation, of which I will not go into detail here. If
interested, please refer to his works:
 Bandura, A. (1977). Social Learning Theory. New York:
General Learning Press.
 Bandura, A. (1969). Principles of Behavior
Modification. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
 Bandura, A. & Walters, R. (1963). Social Learning and
Personality Development. New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston.
1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bandura
2. http://www.learning-theories.com/sociallearning-theory-bandura.html
3.http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/bandura.ht
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