Albert Bandura was born on December 4, 1925 in the small town of Mundare in Northern Alberta, Canada. He was educated in a small elementary school and college in a single building, with minimal resources, although with a significant success rate. After high school, he worked for a summer filling holes in the Alaska Highway in the Yukon.
He completed his bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of British Columbia in 1949. He then transferred to the University of Iowa, where he met Virginia Varns, a nursing school instructor. They married and later had two daughters. Following his graduation, he took up a post-doctoral candidacy at the Wichita Guidance Center in Wichita, Kansas.
In 1953, he began teaching at Stanford University. While there, she collaborated with his first graduate student, Richard Walters, resulting in a first book titled Adolescent Aggression in 1959. Sadly, Walters died young in a motorcycle accident.
Bandura was President of the APA in 1973 and received the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions in 1980. He remains active to this day at Stanford University.
behaviorismwith its emphasis on experimental methods, It focuses on variables that can be observed, measured and manipulated and rejects everything that is subjective, internal and unavailable. (pe the mental). In the experimental method, the standard procedure is to manipulate one variable and then measure its effects on another. All of this leads to a theory of personality that says that one’s environment causes our behavior.
Bandura considered that This was a little simple for the phenomenon I was observing. (aggression in adolescents) and therefore decided to add a little more to the formula: he suggested that the environment causes the behavior; true, but that behavior causes the environment as well. He defined this concept as reciprocal determinism: the world and a person’s behavior cause each other.
Later, he went a step further. He began to consider personality as an interaction between three “things”: the environment, behavior, and the person’s psychological processes. These processes consist of our ability to harbor images in our minds and in language. From the moment he introduces imagination in particular, he stops being a strict behaviorist and begins to approach the cognitivists. In fact, he is usually considered the father of the cognitive movement.
Adding imagination and language to the mix allows Bandura to theorize much more effectively than, say, BF Skinner regarding two things that many people consider “the strong core” of the human species: learning by observation (modeling). ) and self-regulation.
Learning by observation or modeling
Of Bandura’s hundreds of studies, one group stands above the rest, the Bobo Doll Studies. He made it from a film by one of his students, where a young student was just hitting a silly doll. In case you don’t know, a booby doll is an inflatable egg-shaped creature with a certain weight on its base that makes it wobble when hit. Currently they have Darth Vader painted, but at that time it had the clown “Bobo” as the protagonist.
The young woman hit the doll, shouting “stupid!” She hit him, sat on him, hit him with a hammer and did other things, shouting various aggressive phrases. Bandura showed the film to a group of kindergarten children who, as you can imagine, jumped for joy when they saw it. Afterwards she was left to them to play. In the game room, of course, there were several observers with pens and folders, a new silly doll, and some small hammers.
And you will be able to predict what the observers noted: a large chorus of children shamelessly beating the silly doll. They hit him shouting “stupid!”, they sat on him, they hit him with hammers and so on. In other words, they imitated the young woman in the movie, and quite accurately.
This might seem like an experiment with little input at first, but consider for a moment: these children changed their behavior without initially having reinforcement aimed at exploiting said behavior! And while this may not seem extraordinary to any parent, teacher, or casual observer of children, it didn’t fit very well with standard behavioral learning theories. Bandura called the phenomenon learning by observation or modeling, and his theory is usually known as the social learning theory.
Bandura carried out a large number of variations on the study in question: the model was rewarded or punished in various ways in different ways; children were rewarded for their imitations; The model was changed for another less attractive or less prestigious one and so on. In response to criticism that the clown was made to be “hit,” Bandura even made a movie where a girl hit a real clown. When the children were led to the other playroom, they found what they were looking for…a real clown! They proceeded to kick him, hit him, hit him with a hammer, etc.
All these variants allowed Bandura to establish that there are certain steps involved in the modeling process:
1. Attention. If you’re going to learn something, you need to be paying attention. In the same way, anything that hinders attention will result in a detriment to learning, including observational learning. If, for example, you are sleepy, high, sick, nervous or even “hyper”, you will learn less well. The same thing happens if you are distracted by a competitive stimulus.
Some of the things that influence attention have to do with the properties of the model. If the model is colorful and dramatic, for example, we pay more attention. If the model is attractive or prestigious or appears to be particularly competent, we will pay more attention. And if the model is more like us, we will pay more attention. These types of variables directed Bandura towards the examination of television and its effects on children.
2. Retention. Second, we must be able to retain (remember) what we have paid attention to. This is where imagination and language come into play: we store what we have seen the model do in the form of mental images or verbal descriptions. Once “archived”, we can resurface the image or description so that we can reproduce it with our own behavior.
3. Reproduction. At this point, we’re just there daydreaming. We must translate the images or descriptions to the current behavior. Therefore, the first thing we must be able to do is reproduce the behavior. I can spend a whole day watching an Olympic skater doing his job and not be able to reproduce his jumps, since I don’t know how to skate at all! On the other hand, if I could skate, my performance would actually improve if I watched better skaters. that I.
Another important issue regarding reproduction is that our ability to imitate improves with practice of the behaviors involved in the task. And another thing: our skills improve even just by imagining ourselves doing the behavior! Many athletes, for example, imagine the act they are going to do before carrying it out.
4. Motivation. Even with all this, we still won’t do anything unless we are motivated to imitate; that is, unless we have good reasons to do so. Bandura mentions a number of reasons:
- Past reinforcement, such as traditional or classical behaviorism.
- Promised reinforcements, (incentives) that we can imagine.
- Vicarious reinforcement, the possibility of perceiving and recovering the model as a reinforcer.
Note that these reasons have traditionally been considered those things that “cause” learning. Bandura tells us that these are not so much causative as samples of what we have learned. That is, he considers them more as motives.
Of course, negative motivations also exist, giving us reasons not to imitate:
- Past punishment.
- Promised punishment (threats)
- Vicarious punishment.
Like most classical behaviorists, Bandura says that punishment in its various forms does not work as well as reinforcement and, in fact, has a tendency to backfire.
Self-regulation
Self-regulation (controlling our own behavior) is the other cornerstone of human personality. In this case, Bandura suggests three steps:
1. Self-observation. We see ourselves, our behavior and take clues from it.
2. Judgment. We compare what we see with a standard. For example, we can compare our actions with other traditionally established ones, such as “rules of etiquette.” Or we can create some new ones, like “I will read a book a week.” Or we can compete with others, or with ourselves.
3. Auto-response. If we have done well in the comparison with our standard, we give reward responses to ourselves. If we don’t come out well, we will give ourselves punitive self-responses. These self-responses can range from the most obvious extreme (saying something bad to ourselves or working late), to the more covert one (feelings of pride or shame).
A very important concept in psychology that could be well understood with self-regulation is self-concept (better known as self-esteem). If over the years, we see that we have acted more or less according to our standards and have had a life full of personal rewards and praise, we will have a pleasant self-concept (high self-esteem). If, on the contrary, we have always seen ourselves as incapable of reaching our standards and punishing ourselves for it, we will have a poor self-concept (low self-esteem).
Note that behaviorists generally consider reinforcement as effective and punishment as fraught with problems. The same goes for self-punishment. Bandura sees three possible results of excessive self-punishment:
Compensation. For example, a superiority complex and delusions of grandeur.Inactivity. Apathy, boredom, depression. Escape. Drugs and alcohol, television fantasies or even the most radical escape, suicide.
The above has some resemblance to the unhealthy personalities that Adler and Horney talked about; the aggressive type, the submissive type and the avoidant type respectively.
Bandura’s recommendations for people suffering from poor self-concepts arise directly from the three steps of self-regulation:
Concerning self-observation. know yourself!. Make sure you have an accurate picture of your behavior.
Concerning standards. Make sure your standards are not set too high. Do not we embark in a road to failure. However, standards that are too low are meaningless.
Concerning self-response. Use personal rewards, not self-punishments. Celebrate your victories, don’t deal with your failures.
Self-control therapy
The ideas in…