Albert Bandura

Albert Bandura was a Canadian-American psychologist whose social learning theory and concept of self-efficacy reshaped twentieth-century psychology. A 2002 survey published in the Review of General Psychology ranked him the fourth most-cited psychologist of the twentieth century, after B. F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, and Sigmund Freud.

He was born on December 4, 1925, in Mundare, Alberta, the youngest of six children of Polish and Ukrainian immigrant homesteaders. He earned his BA from the University of British Columbia in 1949 and his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Iowa in 1952. He joined the Stanford University faculty in 1953 and remained there for the rest of his career, eventually as the David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology.

His Bobo doll experiments of 1961 and 1963 demonstrated that children would imitate filmed adult aggression toward an inflatable clown doll, providing influential empirical support for observational learning. Social Learning Theory (1977) and Social Foundations of Thought and Action (1986) developed these findings into a broad social-cognitive account of human behavior.

From the late 1970s his work on perceived self-efficacy — an individual's belief in their capacity to act — became central to research on motivation, education, and health. He served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1974 and received the National Medal of Science in 2016. He died at his home in Stanford, California, on July 26, 2021, at age 95.

The given name Albert is of Germanic origin, from adal ("noble") and beraht ("bright"), meaning "noble and bright." It is a masculine name, and he bore it.