[MUSIC PLAYING]

ALBERT BANDURA: I grew up in a small rural town in Alberta. This is where all the cold fronts originate. My parents migrated from Eastern Europe, my father from Poland and my mother from Ukraine. They had no formal education.

My dad laid track for the Trans-Canada Railroad. And when he saved enough money, he purchased a homestead. They were really the pioneers of the Canadian nation. They had nothing.

In academia, we debate constructionism. This is not a conceptual concept, this is reality. Mundare was woefully short of educational resources. Grade 1 through 12 were housed in a single building. And there were only a couple of teachers who taught the entire high school curriculum. I had virtually no resources.

At one point, my mother sat me down and said Albert, you have to decide what you want to do with your life. You can stay here, you can till the soil, or you might try to get an education. So in search of a benign climate, I decided I'll register at the University of British Columbia.

And so I was sitting in the library one day, waiting for my class, and some student left a course catalog on the table, and I was flipping through it. Psychology seemed to be a perfect filler, so I enrolled in it and found my profession. So this was a choice by fortuity rather than by intention.

When I was a graduate student, my friend was late getting to the golf course. So they bumped us to a later time. And there were two women ahead of us. And they were slowing down and we were speeding up. And before long, we were a jovial foursome. I met my wife-to-be in the sand trap! These experiences showed me that there's a lot of fortuity in our life paths. Psychology avoids fortuity and chance like the plague. It really screws up our prediction models and so on. But I felt that we should be able to bring some science to bear on the fortuitous character of life.

Now, psychology can't predict fortuitous events. But psychology should predict that once they occur, are they going to leave you untouched? Are they going to influence you? Or are they going to branch you into entirely new directions in life? So I set up a conceptual scheme as to predicting the effect, depending on your own personal attributes, and also the nature of the inaugurating environment. I was bringing in some sort of novel features into psychology.

There are two ways in which you can exercise some influence on the fortuitous character of life. One, you can make chance happen by leading an active life and exposing yourself to a lot of different ideas. And the second, you can make chance work for you by developing your interests, your competencies, and other personal characteristics so when a fortuitous event occurs, you can take advantage of it.

At the time I began my career, behaviorism had the dominant influence in the field. According to this theoretical orientation, behavior was shaped and regulated mainly by rewarding and punishing consequences. I couldn't imagine how the complexities of language or modern competencies could be shaped individually in each member by trial and error. We had the advent of television. And so now, televised influences were being pumped into every home. The networks were working on a false assumption that people crave violence, and so most of their programming during the early evening time had a certain amount of violence in them.

So the families were getting concerned about what is its effect. Now at that time, the catharsis hypothesis was assuming that exposure to violence drains the aggressive impulses and reduces aggression. I wanted to know the extent to which aggression was transmitted symbolically. So I tried an experiment in which very young children observed a model pummeling a doll with a mallet, hitting it, and then kicking it around the room and punching and throwing it down and beating it in the face.

After the children had observed it in a television format, we would measure the extent to which they picked up exactly the kind of behavior that was being modeled. And what we found is that in fact, the children were modeling this behavior, and it even was activating other forms of aggression that were modeled, such as gunplay and so on. That was our link now to begin to develop a theory that emphasizes the symbolic environment as the major source of influence.

The Bobo doll sort of follows me wherever I go. I'm checking through the Vancouver customs, and the custom agent said, you did the Boba doll experiment, didn't you? I'm checking into a hotel in Washington and the clerk says, aren't you the guy who did the Boba doll experiment? Hell, I'll give you a room in the quiet part of the hotel. [LAUGHS] Another central feature of social cognitive theory is my abiding interest in translating or knowledge for human betterment and human enlightenment.

I decided that we not only can promote aggression in modeling, but we can also use modeling for therapeutic purposes. So I launched a whole program of research on developing new forms of therapy based on modeling and guided mastery. We felt we need to get away from the talk therapy and develop therapies in which people would confront the problems they have, and then you enable them to take the steps to change their lives for the better. So it is a more action-oriented treatment.

I started with severe snake phobics, and not only did we remove their phobia, we got corresponding biological changes. And the most interesting generalization is it changes their dream activity. So they'd come in and say Al, I had a dream yesterday in which the boa constrictor befriended me and was helping me wash the dishes. It really was a transformative experience, because namely it showed me that I had the capability to change. They were acting on their own and doing a lot of things that they feared— public speaking, horseback riding and so on.

And they were telling me they had acquired a tremendous sense of efficacy. And so I decided to shift the direction of my research from just the modeling part to trying to understand what is this belief system? How do you build it? So I had a theory and it worked in four ways.

Namely, it influences you cognitively, whether you think pessimistically or optimistically. Secondly, it affects motivation, the kind of goals you set up for yourself and your ability to persist in the face of difficulties. Third, it affects your emotional life, mainly your vulnerability to stress and depression. Then probably the most important one, it affects the decisions you make in critical times, because the decisions you make pretty much defines what your life path is going to be.

You build it through guided masteries, you build it through modeling if you see people similar to yourself. Being able to struggle and being able to master it, it increases your efficacy that you can do it. It's built up by people you trust who express faith in your capability in situations where you're going to succeed rather than fail.