Social Learning Theory

Albert Bandura came up with the idea of social learning, which explains how people learn new behaviors by watching how others do them. Bandura showed that a lot of what we learn happens in social settings, which is different from the strict behaviorist view that says all learning comes from direct experience. This idea says that people, especially kids, do what they see other people do, especially if that behavior gets them something good or nothing bad. During the 1960s, Bandura did the famous "Bobo doll" studies, which showed how children learn by watching others. In these tests, kids who saw an adult acting mean toward an inflatable doll imitated that behavior when they played, especially when the adult's actions seemed to work.

    This is an important part of social learning theory: it says that learning means thinking. Bandura noticed that the chances of learning and doing an action that has been seen are affected by attention, memory, and motivation. The idea of self-efficacy, which means having faith in your own power to do something, was also his. This idea comes from the idea of social learning and is a key part of a bigger context for social cognition. This idea has been used a lot to change the way schools and the media work and to explain how habits spread through communities. People could learn how to behave well by seeing good examples in the media or in the school, for example. The social learning theory helps us understand how people learn by showing how observers can change how people learn and how the world and how people think affect behavior.