Albert Bandura

Albert Bandura was a Canadian psychologist whose research reshaped modern psychology’s understanding of learning, behavior, and human agency. At Stanford University, he developed social cognitive theory, examining how personal beliefs, behavior, and environment interact, and he established self-efficacy—the belief in one’s ability to influence outcomes—as a central psychological concept. His influential Bobo doll experiments demonstrated how people can learn behaviors through observation, while his later work applied self-efficacy to education, health, and personal development.