Albert Bandura Essay

For my individual paper I have chosen to write about a famous psychologist and his life’s work. I will begin with the story of his life, then his theories, and finally his experiments and how they have changed the study of psychology. Albert Bandura is a famous Psychologist from Canada. He was born on December 4th, 1925 in a small town outside of Edmonton Canada. He was the youngest of the six children, and his early education consisted of one small school with two teachers. He was a strong believer in the idea that education is what you made it and so he did a lot of learning on his own. These early thoughts have been tied into explaining his theories. Later, in his twenties Albert Bandura attended the University of British Columbia where he started as a biological sciences major but fell in love with psychology by accident. While working nights to pay for school he began commuting to school with a group of friends. This lead to him arriving at school much earlier than his classes …show more content…
Social learning theory made to the importances of observational learning, imitation and modeling beyond quesetionable. His theory combined a continuous interaction between behaviors, cognitions and the environment to see what they out come would be. This led to his most famous experiment. The experiment was the named Bobo doll study. The experiment ran as fallowed Albert Bandura made a movie of a woman beating up a Bobo doll and yelling. He then showed the movie to children. Afterwards, the children were told to play in a room that had a Bobo doll in it. The children immediately began to beat the doll, mimicking the woman in the movie. The significance of the study was it differentiated from behaviorism’s ideas that all behavior is influenced by reinforcement or rewards. The children ere given no prize or punishment for beating up the doll; they were just copying the woman they had seen. Bandura named this “observational