A Teacher
Albert Bandura
Self-efficacy and reciprocal determinism
The transmission
Albert Bandura (born December 4, 1925, in Mundare, Alberta, Canada; died July 26, 2021, in Stanford, California) was a Canadian-American psychologist whose work bridged behaviorism and the cognitive revolution and made him, by citation count, one of the most influential psychologists in history.
He earned his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Iowa in 1952 and joined the Stanford University faculty in 1953, where he spent his entire career. His early Bobo doll experiments (1961-1963) demonstrated that children learn aggression by observing and imitating models, not only through direct reinforcement, overturning the strict behaviorist assumption that learning required personal reward or punishment.
From this grew social learning theory and later social cognitive theory, in which behavior, personal factors (especially beliefs and cognition), and environment continuously influence one another — a model Bandura called reciprocal determinism.
His most consequential single construct, introduced in a landmark 1977 paper and elaborated in Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (1997), was self-efficacy: a person’s belief in their capacity to organize and execute the actions required to produce a given result.
Bandura showed across many domains — phobia treatment, health behavior, achievement — that efficacy beliefs predict whether people attempt difficult tasks, how much effort they sustain, and how they recover from setbacks, making belief-about-one’s-own-agency a measurable cause of outcome.
What they gave
Self-efficacy: Established, with experimental rigor, that belief in one’s own capability is a measurable determinant of effort, persistence, and achievement across domains.
- Observational learning: Showed that people acquire behavior, emotion, and expectation by watching models, expanding the mechanisms of change beyond direct reinforcement.
- Reciprocal determinism: Modeled the person as neither a passive product of environment nor a free agent, but a node where belief, behavior, and situation shape one another.
- Human agency: Framed people as proactive, self-regulating agents whose forethought and self-belief partly author their own circumstances, an empirical counterpart to mind-power claims about self-concept.
In their words
Beliefs of personal efficacy constitute the key factor of human agency. If people believe they have no power to produce results, they will not attempt to make things happen.
People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided.
Self-efficacy beliefs determine how people feel, think, motivate themselves and behave.
Those who have a high sense of efficacy, visualize success scenarios that provide positive guides and supports for performance. Those who doubt their efficacy, visualize failure scenarios and dwell on the many things that can go wrong.
Much human behavior, being purposive, is regulated by forethought embodying valued goals.
Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure.
Persons who have a strong sense of efficacy deploy their attention and effort to the demands of the situation and are spurred by obstacles to greater effort.
If self-efficacy is lacking, people tend to behave ineffectually, even though they know what to do.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Behaviorist learning theory (which he extended and revised); the field-theoretical psychology of Kurt Lewin; his Stanford colleague Robert Sears; and the emerging cognitive psychology of the 1950s-60s.
- Influenced: Self-efficacy interventions in education, clinical, and health psychology; the wider social learning and social cognitive tradition; behavioral medicine; and the agentic, self-regulation strand of modern psychology.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Social Learning Theory1977
- Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control1997