Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do.
Psychologists
Albert Bandura
Canadian-American psychologist (1925-2021) who taught at Stanford for over half a century and founded social learning theory together with the concept of self-efficacy. His 1961 Bobo doll experiment demonstrated observational learning and helped pivot psychology from strict behaviorism to cognitive accounts of human action. He later developed social cognitive theory and the analysis of moral disengagement, applying his agentic view of the person to education, public health, media research and organizations. A 2002 citation ranking and a 2025 Google Scholar milestone confirm him as one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, even as debate continues over the ethics of his early experiments.
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Albert Bandura's Other Quotes
Self-efficacy is the belief in one's capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations.
People who regard themselves as highly efficacious act, think, and feel differently from those who perceive themselves as inefficacious. They produce their own future, rather than simply foretell it.
In agentic transactions, people are producers as well as products of social systems.
Moral disengagement does not alter moral standards. It changes how those standards apply to particular conduct and circumstances.