Albert Bandura

Life & Legacy

Albert Bandura (December 4, 1925 – July 26, 2021) was a Canadian-American psychologist and professor of social science in psychology at Stanford University, who contributed to the fields of education and to the fields of psychology (e.g., social cognitive theory, therapy, and personality psychology), and influenced the transition between behaviorism and cognitive psychology. Bandura also is known as the originator of social learning theory, social cognitive theory, and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy. He was responsible for the theoretically influential Bobo doll experiment (1961), which demonstrated the conceptual validity of observational learning, wherein children would observe an adult act either aggressively or neutrally toward a doll, and, having learned through observation, were more likely to also beat the doll if they had witnessed the aggressive behavior.
A 2002 survey ranked Bandura as the fourth most frequently cited psychologist of all time, behind B. F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Piaget. In April 2025, Bandura became the first psychologist with more than a million Google Scholar citations. During his lifetime, Bandura was widely described as the greatest living psychologist, and as one of the most influential psychologists of all time.