I haven’t failed. I’ve identified 10,000 ways this doesn’t work.”
Thomas Edison
Most of the ideas for my PhD are based on the work of Albert Bandura, who is probably the most prominent academic figure in the field of self-efficacy. Without Bandura, a PhD on this stuff would certainly be a lot harder… I want to try to introduce Bandura to you in a nutshell, which will be hard to do with a man who had such an incredible life.
Bandura’s family were no strangers to adversity themselves, which might have been the reason for his devotion to the subject matter later on. As the son of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants, Albert Bandura was born in 1925 in the 400-soul village of Mundare, Canada, as the youngest and the only boy of a set of six children. His parents had no formal education, but showed remarkable resilience and self-efficacy throughout their lives, with his father, for instance, teaching himself to read three languages.
The pioneer life proved to be difficult for the family, however. In tough years of drought they had to feed part of their thatched rooftop to the cattle to save them from starvation. They lost one of their children in a hunting accident and another was claimed by the pandemic flu. Bandura’s mother worked as a nurse at the time wandering from home to home to help those who had survived.
Nevertheless, the family succeeded in providing Bandura with an education and he went to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver after finishing high school. To make ends meet he worked in a woodwork plant in the afternoons and took classes in the morning. By coincidence, he decided to enrol in a psychology class as a filler for an earlier time slot. Psychology sparked his interest; he found his passion for it and never looked back. In order to find what he called “the stone tablets of psychology”, Bandura then went on to pursue graduate studies at the University of Iowa, where he received a PhD degree in clinical psychology in 1952.
In 1953, Bandura joined the faculty at Stanford University, where he also published his first book, Adolescent Aggression, in 1959. His further research concentrated on the development of a theory of social modelling, taking into consideration how people learn by observation rather than simply through the consequences of their own actions. In 1964, Bandura became full professor at Stanford University and in 1977 he published his ambitious research results in the book Social Learning Theory, which was to dramatically alter the direction of psychology in the 1980s.
Looking at Bandura’s life and experiences, it becomes very obvious just how important self-efficacy and resilience are in any success story and that it’s not only about the opportunities that are given to you – may they be positive or negative in nature – but how you choose to make use of them…
He who has a why to live for, can endure almost any how.
Dr. Victor Frankyl, Psychiatrist
Bibliographical information from http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/bandurabio.html.
