In this video, Albert Bandura discusses how he came to study psychology. While enrolled at the University of British Columbia, Bandura happened to take a psychology course, and that decision directed the rest of his professional career. He believed that psychology should be able to predict events and influence such events. Bandura developed experiments related to the fortuity of events and the influence of a person’s environment. He thought we could make chance happen through living an active life and exposing oneself to different ideas, or make chance work for us by developing our interests, competencies, and characteristics so those chances can be used in our favor.
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Bandura started his career when behaviorism was predominant, which stated that behaviors were shaped by rewards and consequences. But he did not believe that all behaviors, such as language, could be explained by behaviorism.
For instance, during the emergence of the television in households, Bandura developed research questions related to violence exposure. Many families were reportedly concerned about their children viewing violence on television. Though the catharsis hypothesis at that time stated that viewing violence reduced violent impulses or a desire to act aggressively, Bandura wanted to test whether violence could be learned symbolically. This research question prompted his famous Bobo doll experiment, where children observed an adult display aggression toward a blow-up doll. The children were then left in the room alone with the doll, and many modeled the aggressive behavior displayed by the adult.
Bandura’s social cognitive theory emphasized the symbolic environment as a source of influence and that human behavior is based on a person’s environment. Bandura also became interested in the therapeutic efforts that could be made using modeling. He developed behavioral forms of therapy based on his modeling and guided mastery frameworks. His original clinical research began with individuals diagnosed with snake phobias. He noted a number of psychological and physiological changes during the treatments, such that many participants gained full remission of symptoms. Bandura also focused on the study of self-efficacy and how such beliefs could influence cognitive, motivational, and emotional beliefs, as well as decision making.