Much of Bandura’s work has focused on the acquisition and modification of personality traits in children, particularly as they are affected by observational learning, or modeling, which, he argues, plays a highly significant role in the determination of subsequent behavior. While it is common knowledge that children learn by imitating others, little formal research was done on this subject before Neal Miller and John Dollard published Social Learning and Imitation in 1941. Bandura has been the single figure most responsible for building a solid empirical foundation for the concept of learning through modeling, or imitation. His work, focusing particularly on the nature of aggression, suggests that modeling plays a highly significant role in determining thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Bandura claims that practically anything that can be learned by direct experience can also be learned by modeling. Moreover, learning by modeling will occur although neither the observer nor the model is rewarded for performing a particular action, in contrast to the behaviorist learning methods of Ivan Pavlov and B.F. Skinner, with their focus on learning through conditioning and reinforcement. However, it has been demonstrated that punishment and reward can have an effect on the modeling situation. A child will more readily imitate a model who is being rewarded for an act than one who is being punished. Thus, the child can learn without actually being rewarded or punished himself—a concept known as vicarious learning. Similarly, Bandura has shown that when a model is exposed to stimuli intended to have a conditioning effect, a person who simply observes this process, even with-out participating in it directly, will tend to become conditioned by the stimuli as well.
Taken from : The Gale Encyclopedia Of Psychology 2ND Edition - Bonnie Strickland
