The Cognitive Revolutionary Influence

How modern psychology has changed our mental world.

The not so long history of psychology has shown movement after countermovement emerge quite quickly after one another. In the late 1950s, early 1960s, a couple of newly influential psychologists rattled the cage and introduced new ways of thinking that are still influential today.

Bandura

Albert Bandura provided a much-needed bridge from the behaviorists, like B.F. Skinner, towards cognitive psychology with his social-cognitive theory. Bandura noticed that you can learn new things not just by experiencing conditioning yourself, but also by observing someone else undergoing conditioning. This is described by psychologists as observational learning.

Bandura became famous for his so-called Bobo doll experiments. Between 1961 and 1963, he studied children’s behavior after watching an actor act aggressively towards a Bobo doll. He wanted to see if children’s learned behavior would be influenced by vicarious reinforcement, or the act of imitating a behavior observed in another person after witnessing that person be reinforced for said behavior. For instance, Bandura measured the children’s behavior after seeing the actor rewarded, punished, or experience no consequence for physically abusing the Bobo doll.