Bandura, Albert (1925-)

Early Social Learning Theory: The Importance of Observational Learning

Albert Bandura is one of the founders of behaviorally-oriented approaches to behavior change, including behaviorally-oriented psychotherapy. The psychody-namic drive model dominated the field of psychotherapy when he began his academic career, so his early work was met with skepticism and resistance from the established psychotherapy community. Beginning with his landmark 1963 book Social Learning and Personality Development, coauthored with R. Walters, he proposed a learning model based on the important role of observational learning and the consequences of behavior. He then began a major program of research focusing in particular on the role of observational learning (also known as imitation or modeling) on the behavior of children.

Bandura soon applied his work to the treatment of adults with phobias, first snake phobia and later the broader family of agoraphobias. The treatment that evolved was based on the idea of guided mastery and designed to decrease fears by gradually increasing the client's sense of confidence or mastery in the behavioral domain in question. This guided mastery involved successful exposures to the feared stimuli through modeling, for example, of the therapist successfully engaging in the feared behavior, along with exposure to a graded series of “approach” tasks.

The Emergence of Self-Efficacy

While evaluating these guided mastery treatments, Bandura found that they often generalized to other domains of behavior. For example, clients successfully treated for an animal phobia often showed gains in social confidence and public speaking confidence. Bandura concluded that the success of the treatment was actually the result of increased self-efficacy expectations (i.e., an increased sense of confidence in one's own behavioral competencies) with respect to the target behavior (and often other domains of behavior). In the 1970s he proposed a theory of behavior change with self-efficacy as the underlying causal mechanism. He theorized that psychological treatments worked because and to the extent that they were successful in increasing clients' perceptions of self-efficacy with respect to target behaviors. Based on the assumption of self-efficacy as the underlying mechanism of change, [Page 468]the counselor could design interventions designed to increase self-efficacy expectations.

Bandura noted in his 1977 book, Social Learning Theory, that perceived self-efficacy refers to “beliefs in one's capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given attainments” (p. 3). Higher levels of self-efficacy are postulated to lead to “approach” rather than “avoidance” behavior, to better performance of enacted behaviors, and to persistence in the face of obstacles and discontinuing experiences. Bandura's theory identifies four sources of efficacy information that both lead to the initial development of efficacy expectations and can be used to increase them: performance accomplishments, vicarious learning (modeling), emotional arousal (anxiety), and social persuasion and encouragement.

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