Bandura question

According to Bandura’s influential theory of imitation, also called social learning theory, four factors are necessary for a person to learn through observation and then imitate a behavior: attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation.

• First, the learner must pay attention to the crucial details of the model’s behavior. A young girl watching her father bake a cake will not be able to imitate this behavior successfully unless she pays attention to many important details—ingredients, quantities, oven temperature, baking time, and so on.
• The second factor is retention—the learner must be able to retain all of this information in memory until it is time to use it. If the person forgets important details, he or she will not be able to successfully imitate the behavior.
• Third, the learner must have the physical skills and coordination needed for reproduction of the behavior. The young girl must have enough strength and dexterity to mix the ingredients, pour the batter, and so on, in order to bake a cake on her own.
• Finally, the learner must have the motivation to imitate the model. That is, learners are more likely to imitate a behavior if they expect it to lead to some type of reward or reinforcement. If learners expect that imitating the behavior will not lead to reward or might lead to punishment, they are less likely to imitate the behavior.

According to Bandura, learning occurs when an individual observe others, interact with others and tries to imitate others. He proved the connection between observation and person's new behavior response even though it was not learned before, by his Bobo doll experiment.

Based on this theory, individual become aggressive because he or she imitates role models. It happens due to vicarious reinforcement. When the person happened to observe his or her model being rewarded for aggressive behavior, he or she becomes reinforced vicariously.

Generally, people desire to get approval for their behavior. Individual can be influenced by multiple models such as parents, teachers, hero of a film, friends, etc. He or she want to possess the qualities or abilities of the model they observe.

The theory of social learning is regarded the best because it considers the interplay of environmental and cognitive factors that tend to influence one's human learning and behavior.


According to Skinner, the learning perspective is associated with child involves radical behaviorism & environment has specific influence on behavior. It involves rewards and punishments with operant conditioning of learning in children with schedules of reinforcement, superstitious behavior my result in them. According to Skinner’s goal with the “baby box” was to control a child’s environment through the principles of operant conditioning. The predominant focus of operant conditioning is how the immediate environment shapes behavior through reinforcement and consequences to avoid destructive behavior. In case of Skinner's second child, Deborah, he built a controlled environment (rough version of the baby box) for simplifying baby care and cognitive development.

According to Bandura, children learning perspective is mainly associated with anticipated outcomes based on observational learning where environmental cues has specific impact on them.

Behavioral cognitive theory: According to Bandura, behavior is resultant response due to complex interplay between environmental cues & inner processes in any species finally attain empirical validity.           

As per cognitive theories behavioral concern always involves a variety of environmental stimulus and concerned response, it could be voluntary response or reflexive response. These responses are associated with cues. This behavior is mainly based on external rewards through cortico-striatal pathway.

Social cognitive theory: This theory of personality with more applied value and which is based on attentional and retentional processes (observational learning) to deliver a specific motor reproduction of behavior. The social behavior & prosocial of a person is mainly depends on the negative & positive reinforcements produced according events in society.