Children copied the adults who hit Bobo, and psychology changed course
In 1961 Albert Bandura let children watch an adult either attack an inflatable doll or ignore it. Those who saw the violence were more likely to pummel the doll themselves. The finding that we learn simply by watching helped pull psychology away from pure reward-and-punishment behaviourism toward the study of the mind.
Bandura was born on 4 December 1925 in Mundare, Alberta, a settlement of roughly 400 people, the youngest of six children of a father from Kraków and a Ukrainian mother. The village school was so limited that he learned to teach himself. A summer after high school spent in the Yukon, shoring up the Alaska Highway amid a hard-drinking, gambling camp culture, first sparked his curiosity about psychopathology.
He finished a psychology degree at the University of British Columbia in three years, then earned his doctorate in clinical psychology at Iowa in 1952 under Arthur Benton. Iowa gave him a taste for repeatable experiments, but he broke with the reigning behaviourism by admitting inner processes such as imagery and by proposing reciprocal determinism, in which a person and their surroundings shape each other. He joined Stanford in 1953 and stayed until becoming emeritus in 2010. When he stood for president of the American Psychological Association, he later claimed he only wanted fifteen minutes of fame; he won, in 1974.
With his first doctoral student, Richard Walters, he studied aggression and imitation, producing Adolescent Aggression in 1959. The doll study showed that the consequences adults faced mattered: children kept hitting when the model was praised and stopped when the model was punished. Skinner-style conditioning, Bandura argued, could not explain how much people pick up from one another. His social learning theory also underpinned Miguel Sabido's entertainment-education, which builds socially useful messages into popular drama.
Treating people with snake phobias led him to his best-known later idea. Patients improved in step with self-efficacy, their belief in their own ability to cope. Social Foundations of Thought and Action in 1986 cast people as proactive and self-regulating, and Self-Efficacy followed in 1997; researchers have since linked low self-efficacy to relapse among people trying to quit smoking. A 2002 survey placed him fourth among the most cited psychologists, behind Skinner, Freud and Piaget. He died on 26 July 2021, and in April 2025 he became the first psychologist to pass a million Google Scholar citations.
Source: Albert Bandura
