[the spark]
Power Comes From Within
Albert Bandura grew up the youngest of six in a remote Alberta town, where the local high school had two teachers and no real path to higher education.
Students were expected to take charge of their own learning, and Bandura did.
He left for the University of British Columbia, where psychology found him by accident. Killing time before class one morning, he flipped through a course catalog and picked a psychology class as a “filler.” It stuck.
Within three years, he graduated and moved on to graduate studies at the University of Iowa, where he began questioning the limits of behaviorism, the dominant theory of the time that claimed all behaviors are learned through interaction.
In 1961, at Stanford, he designed the now-famous Bobo Doll experiment. In the experiment, children watched a film of an adult hitting a clown-shaped doll. When given the same doll, many mimicked the exact behavior, without instruction, reward, or punishment.
His findings uprooted the behaviorists, who believed that learning required direct reinforcement. Bandura showed that people could acquire new behaviors simply by watching others, and that confidence in their ability to follow suit often predicted whether they would succeed.
From this insight, he built social learning theory, a framework explaining how observation shapes skills, attitudes, and outcomes.
Over nearly seven decades, Bandura reshaped psychology, giving scientists, teachers, and leaders practical tools for turning examples into action and actualizing self-belief.
