Albert Bandura, a psychology professor at Stanford University, became discontented with the idea that all behavior develops because of the environment's direct response to it. Bandura proposed that we learn through imitation. He believed that people can learn new behaviors from watching others rather than by direct reinforcement of their own behaviors from the environment. He returned to the view that internal mental processes play an important role in human learning and human behavior. He called his theory a social cognitive learning theory because the learning occurs from watching other people (social) but is also processed in one's mind (cognitive).
Imitation has four parts:
Imitation has four parts:
- attention to a model
- mental representation or memory of that model's actions
- motoric ability to reproduce the action
- the motivation to imitate the action
Bandura's more recent research based on social cognitive theory has focused on self-efficacy.
Self efficacy: a belief in our own ability to influence our own functioning and our life circumstances