Bandura's Theory

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When developing the theory, Bandura hypothesized that all social learning can be observed by people and people can learned from the observation. Bandura (1961) illustrated the Bobo doll experiment to explain how children observe people 's behaviors and copy the behaviors they have observed. Bandura stated people learn new behaviour by observing and imitating others. To support the hypothesis, researchers conduct different experiments and provide empirical evidences to support what Bandura hypothesized. Pinkham and Jaswal (2011) and Lewis (1974) conducted experiments to test if human learn from observation. Pinkham and Jaswal (2011) conducted experiment on child to see if they could learn how to turn the light box on by observing parents ' …show more content…

The research showed people still learn without reward, but with a chance of lower motivation than people with rewards. Bandura (1925) hypothesized people in all ages learn from observation and they learn in a way of continuity with no developmental stage. According to Piaget, J. (1954), he stated children do not have same thinking mode as adult. Piaget stated people 's cognitive abilities were developed through different stages along the lifespan and Piaget proposed four stages in the children development process. DeVries’s (1969) conducted an experiment on the children who aged 3 to 6 -year-old to test if they can distinguish reality and appearance by showing the cat and then put a 'dog mask ' on the head of the cat. The result showed 3-year-old children think it is a dog after the cat putting on the 'dog mask ' while the 6-year old children think it remained as a cat. People 's cognitive developed and changed even it is just few years older. With inconsistent support from researchers and Bandura 's hypothesis of maturation in the lifespan of people won 't be changed, conclusion can be made that social cognitive theory gives too little attention on the issue of developmental changes. The hypothesis doesn 't fully supported by …show more content…

Christopher Earley conducted a study on the belief of employees ' capabilities and productivity in workplace. Result found if employees were given better production techniques and high production goals, their belief in the capabilities increased. When the self-efficacy of employees increased, they would accept high production goals and result in high level of productivity (Early, 1986, cited as Bandura 1988). Another study which carried by Eden & Aviram (1993) evaluated the influences of providing intensive trainings to the unemployed workers and found workers with low self-efficacy were able to develop higher self-efficacy through