Albert Bandura's Social Learning Theory Case Study

The impact of Albert Bandura’s social learning theory on psychology will be explored in this paper. Bandura took behavioral theory and expanded it to include additional aspects of human experience. This did not happen in isolation, but rather was influenced by other components of behaviorism and other psychologists. Bandura’s social learning theory also opened up new avenues of thought in developmental psychology and can be applied to learning in the workplace.

Extension of Behavioral Theory

Behavioral theory enjoyed immense success and became a predominant mode of thought in psychology for quite a while. Behaviorism maintained that behavior was a result of an organism’s interaction with the environment, and was concerned with observable behavior, rather than internal events such as introspection (Hergenhahn & Henley, 2014). Bandura agreed with

F. Skinner’s suggestion of successive approximation for attaining a new response (Grusec, 1992). Observational learning, or learning through the reflection of others behavior, uses a process known as modeling. Bandura’s modeling detailed four necessary steps in order to attain an effective change in behavior through observation. The first is attention, which is impacted by a variety of different factors, such as gender or perceived power, and serves to increase the emphasis placed on the learning (Grusec, 1992). The second is retention, which is basically how well an event or behavior is able to be recalled and then imitated. The third is reproduction, which is how well the recalled behavior can be replicated; this may be impacted by different factors such as complexity or skill level (Grusec, 1992). The last step is motivation, which would include the reason a behavior is being modeled or how helpful the behavior is perceived to be. Both the mediating process and observational learning helped Bandura to push the boundaries of