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To understand Bandura’s theory, let’s first look at the originator.
Albert Bandura, born in 1925 in Alberta, Canada, became interested in psychology while studying biological sciences at the University of British Columbia (Nabavi, 2012). Graduating with a degree in psychology, Bandura continued his studies and in 1952 was awarded a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Iowa. He was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1974 and awarded the Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology in 2004 (Nabavi, 2012).
Social learning theory, introduced by psychologist Albert Bandura, proposed that learning occurs through observation, imitation, and modelling and is influenced by factors such as attention, motivation, attitudes, and emotions. The theory accounts for the interaction of environmental and cognitive elements that affect how people learn.
Bandura’s theory moves beyond behavioural theories, which suggest that all behaviours are learned through conditioning, and cognitive theories, which consider psychological influences such as attention and memory. According to Bandura, people observe behaviour either directly through social interactions with others or indirectly by observing behaviours through media. Actions that are rewarded are more likely to be imitated, while those that are punished are avoided.

According to the social learning theory, the learning process is divided into four stages: 1-Attention: People are exposed to many different behaviours over the course of their lives but, of course, they don’t learn them all. This is because the learner must first choose a role-model that grabs their attention.The role-model is the person that is going to be observed and imitated and could be a parent, teacher or peer. They are the ones that hold the knowledge and experience that the learner wants and, therefore, will be the person that transmits the learning experience
2-Retention: Once their attention has been caught, the learner must be able to retain and store the information that has been transmitted to them. If they can’t do this, only a limited amount of learning will take place.
3- Reproduction: Simply storing this information successfully does not necessarily imply that the learner knows how to use it correctly. Until now, we’ve talked about learning through observation, but now we need to think about the process of imitation. Imitation can be limited by many factors such as the physical or the mental state of the learner.
4-Motivation: In the last phase, rewards come into play. Here, we’re referring about prizes or punishment based on the success or failure of the learning process. If the rewards are seen as being adequate compensation for the effort of learning, then the process will be more successful. If not, the learner may fail completely in this last phase. In essence, this is the mechanism through which all humans learn. Children might be rewarded with praise or sweets, while adults may be thinking about promotions, or enhanced relationships.
Personality development is the establishment of a set of patterns involving the behaviour, temperament and character that a person displays on a regular basis. Social learning theory postulates that a large amount of the features of people’s personalities may come from observing others in their family or society. The environment, often described as nurture, has a large impact on a child’s personality. One of the richest ages for social learning is the preschool years. If children are not taught how to integrate into groups at this early age, they may have a hard time joining groups when they are older. During school years, children learn how to interact with groups in more structured environments, and through observation and learning can apply self-discipline, follow rules and trust in positive outcomes. Other traits that may be learned socially in childhood include: activity level ,intensity, regularity of sleep and appetite ,adaptability ,persistence.
Bandura developed what famously became known as the Bobo Doll experiments. In these studies, children watched adults model either violent or passive behaviour towards a toy, the Bobo Doll. What the children saw influenced how they themselves subsequently interacted with the doll. Specifically, children who observed violent behaviour imitated this behaviour and were verbally and physically aggressive toward the doll. Children who witnessed nonviolent behaviour behaved less aggressively toward the doll.
Albert Bandura concluded that children learn aggression, violence, and other social behaviours through observation learning, or watching the behaviours of others. On the opposite end, kindness and compassion can be imitated as well.