International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

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Albert Bandura is a pioneering researcher of social modeling in the media ( Zimmerman & Schunk 2002 ). He was born on December 4, 1925 in a rural hamlet in northern Alberta, Canada. He first achieved prominence as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia by winning the Bolocan Award in Psychology. After completing his doctorate at the University of Iowa, he accepted a faculty appointment at Stanford University, where he has remained for more than 50 years. He was elected President of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1974, and has won numerous awards for his research, such as the William James Award and the Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Psychological Science of the APA. Bandura's initial research focused on the mechanisms governing observational learning of aggression, which he reported in a book entitled Social learning and personality development . In a series of seminal experiments using an inflated “Bobo” doll, he found that children readily imitated a social model's aggressive behavior toward the doll when they had an opportunity to interact with it (→  Violence as Media Content, Effects of ; Violence as Media Content, Effects on Children of ). This vicarious increase in aggression occurred after viewing either live or electronically mediated models. At the time, it was widely believed that modeled violence would ... log in or subscribe to read full text