Learning by observing others...Psych 101...

Albert Bandura was born on December 4th, 1925, in the small town of Mundare, Canada. Bandura's father laid tracks for the trans-Canada railroad, and his mother worked at a general store in the town.
Bandura attended the only school in his town- it employed just two teachers- and as a result, Bandura had to take his own initiative when it came to education. Following high school, Bandura attended the University of British Columbia. While originally majoring in biological sciences, Bandura stumbled upon the subject of psychology through happenstance. Because he arrived at the university much earlier than his classes began, he decided to take "filler classes" to pass the time. After thumbing through a course catalogue one day, he ended up choosing a psychology course. 
In 1949, Bandura graduated from the University of British Columbia in just three years, majoring in psychology, and went on to attend graduate school at the University of Iowa, where he would also get his Ph.D. After he earned his Ph.D. in 1952, Bandura was offered a position at Stanford University, where he continues to teach today. 
Bandura is most known for his social learning theory, which showed that not all behavior was lead by rewards or reinforcements, as behaviorism claimed to be the case. Instead, he offered an alternative and somewhat more nuanced view of the social pressures that contribute to learned behaviors- a more modern approach which is still valued. 

1. A person can learn behavior through observation: This can be from a live model (an actual person performing the behavior), a verbal model that provides instructions (an explanation or description of a particular behavior), or a symbolic model (behaviors portrayed in books, television, and film). 

2. The mental state is an important aspect of learning: While environmental reinforcement is one aspect of learning a behavior, it is not the only one. Satisfaction, pride, and feelings of accomplishment are examples of what Bandura called intrinsic or internal reinforcement. In other words, internal thoughts can play an important role in learning a behavior. 

3. Learning does not mean that a behavior will necessarily change: Behaviorists believed that learning a behavior led to a permanent change in the individual's behavior, but Bandura shows that with observational learning, a person can learn the new information without having to demonstrate this behavior. Conversely, just because a behavior is observed does not mean it will be learned. For social learning to be a success, there are certain requirements: 

• Attention: To learn, one must pay attention, and anything that diminishes attention will negatively affect observational learning. 
• Retention: One must be able to store the information, and the at a later time be able to pull it back up and use it. 
• Reproduction: After paying attention and retaining information, the observed behavior has to be performed. Practice can lead to improvement of the behavior.
• Motivation: The last part of successfully learning observed behavior is that a person must be motivated to imitate the behavior. It is here where reinforcement and punishment come into play. If an observed behavior is reinforced, one might wish to duplicate that response; while if an observed behavior is punished, one might be motivated to not do such an action.

THE BOBO DOLL EXPERIMENT

To show that children observe and imitate behaviors around them, Bandura created the famous Bobo doll experiment.

In conducting his experiment, Bandura found that children who watched the aggressive models generally imitated a good deal more of the responses towards the Bobo doll than the children in the control or the children in the group who watched the nonaggressive models.

He also found that girls who watched the aggressive model expressed more verbally aggressive responses when the model was the woman, and more physically aggressive responses when the model was the man.The boys imitated physically aggressive acts more than the girls did, and they imitated the same-sex model more often than the girls did.

Through the Bobo doll experiment, Bandura was able to successfully show that the children learned a social behavior, in this case, aggression, by watching the behavior of someone else. With the Bobo doll experiment, Bandura was able to disprove a key notion of behaviorism that stated that all behavior is the result of rewards and reinforcement.

"Behavior is a mirror in which everyone displays his own image." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. 

~Bella