Role of Albert Bandura in Psychology (Essay Sample)

Albert Bandura in Psychology Name Institutional Affiliation Introduction Albert Bandura is a famous psychologist who has advanced existing psychology theories and modeled new explanations about human behavior. Bandura, a Stanford professor, differed with most of psychological perspectives of his time and wondered why they covered such narrow perspectives. Most of the ideas concentrated on behaviorist expositions. Bandura introduced the social learning theory in psychology. The theory emphasizes on observational learning, modeling and imitation. Bandura expressed his conclusions after conducting experiments on observational learning. He found that children could respond to what they had seen and apply the same actions and words they had seen when they were in similar situations. Observation learning is evident in everyday life since people tend to imitate previewed actions. Thus, observational behavior analysis by Bandura is an important development in psychology. Bandura's theory diverts from the behaviorist model that people act due to the expectation of reward or motivation. In the famous ‘Bobo Doll Study', Bandura proved that people are self-motivated to imitate and reference on a similar occurrence they had observed. The assertion is true since people's actions in a particular scenario are related to actions of other people. It is thus important to understand people motivation and how behaviorist theories fall short to explain this relationship. These renders Bandura's work very relevant in p...