• Psychologist Albert Bandura, 1925
• Psychologist Murray Sidman, 1920+

Albert Bandura (born December 4, 1925, in Mundare, Alberta, Canada) is a psychologist and the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University. Over a career spanning almost six decades, Bandura was responsible for groundbreaking contributions to many fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory, therapy and personality psychology, and was also influential in the transition between behaviorism and cognitive psychology. He is known as the originator of social learning theory and the theory of self - efficacy, and is also responsible for the influential 1961 Bobo doll experiment.

A 2002 survey ranked Bandura as the fourth most frequently cited psychologist of all time, behind B.F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Piaget. Bandura was widely described as the greatest living psychologist, and as one of the most influential psychologists of all time.

In 2008 Bandura won the Grawemeyer Award in psychology.

Bandura was born in Mundare, in Alberta, a small town of roughly four hundred inhabitants, as the youngest child, and only son, in a family of eight. Bandura was of Ukrainian and Polish descent.

The summer after finishing high school, Bandura worked in the Yukon to protect the Alaska Highway against sinking. Bandura later credited his work in the northern tundra as the origin of his interest in human psychopathology.

Bandura is married and has two children.

Bandura's introduction to academic psychology came about by chance; as a student with little to do in the early mornings, he took a psychology course to pass the time, and became enamored of the subject. Bandura graduated in three years, in 1949, with a B.A. from the University of British Columbia, winning the Bolocan Award in psychology, and then moved to the then epicenter of theoretical psychology, the University of Iowa, from where he obtained his M.A. in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1952. Arthur Benton was his academic advisor at Iowa, giving Bandura a direct academic descent from William James, while Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence were influential collaborators. During his Iowa years, Bandura came to support a style of psychology which sought to investigate psychological phenomena through repeatable, experimental testing. His inclusion of such mental phenomena as imagery and representation, and his concept of reciprocal determinism, which postulated a relationship of mutual influence between an agent and its environment, marked a radical departure from the dominant behaviorism of the time. Bandura's expanded array of conceptual tools allowed for more potent modeling of such phenomena as observational learning and self regulation, and provided psychologists with a practical way in which to theorize about mental processes, in opposition to the mentalistic constructs of psychoanalysis and personology.

Upon graduation, he participated in a clinical internship with the Wichita Kansas Guidance Center. The following year, he accepted a teaching position at Stanford University in 1953, in which he remained for his entire career. In 1974 the American Psychological Association elected him as its president. Bandura's academic journey at Stanford University was one embellished with extraordinary colleagues, remarkable students, a fair amount of freedom to go wherever his curiosity might lead, and a school setting ethos that leads to scholarship not as a matter of publishing an article but to view it with puzzle and question.

Bandura was initially influenced by Robert Sears' work on familial antecedents of social behavior and identificatory learning, Bandura directed his initial research to the role of social modeling in human motivation, thought, and action. In collaboration with Richard Walters, his first doctoral student, Bandura engaged in studies of social learning and aggression. Their joint efforts illustrated the critical role of modeling in human behavior and led to a program of research into the determinants and mechanisms of observational learning.

The initial phase of Bandura's research analyzed the foundations of human learning and the propensity of children and adults to imitate behavior observed in others.

Bandura's research with Walters led to his first book, Adolescent Aggression in 1959, and to a subsequent book, Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis in 1973. During a period dominated by behaviorism in the mold of B.F. Skinner, Bandura believed the sole behavioral modifiers of reward and punishment in classical operant conditioning were inadequate as a framework, and that many human behaviors were learned from other humans. Bandura began to analyze means of treating unduly aggressive children by identifying sources of violence in their lives. Initial research in the area had begun in the 1940s under Neal Miller and John Dollard; Bandura's continued work in this line eventually culminated in the Bobo doll experiment, and in 1977's influential treatise, Social Learning Theory. Many of Bandura's innovations came from his focus on empirical investigation and reproducible investigation, which were alien to a field of psychology dominated by the theories of Freud.

In 1961 Bandura conducted a controversial experiment known as the Bobo doll experiment, to study patterns of behavior, at least in part, by social learning theory, and that similar behaviors were learned by individuals shaping their own behavior after the actions of models. The experiment was criticized by some on ethical grounds, for training children towards aggression. Bandura's results from the Bobo Doll Experiment changed the course of modern psychology, and were widely credited for helping shift the focus in academic psychology from pure behaviorism to cognitive psychology. The experiment is among the most lauded and celebrated of psychological experiments.

By the mid 1980s, Bandura's research had taken a more holistic bent, and his analyses tended towards giving a more comprehensive overview of human cognition in the context of social learning. The theory he expanded from social learning theory soon became known as social cognitive theory.

In 1986, Bandura published Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory, in which he reconceptualized individuals as self organizing, proactive, self reflecting, and self regulating, in opposition to the orthodox conception of humans as governed by external forces. Bandura advanced concepts of triadic reciprocality, which determined the connections between human behavior, environmental factors, and personal factors such as cognitive, affective, and biological events, and of reciprocal determinism, governing the causal relations between such factors. Bandura's emphasis on the capacity of agents to self organize and self regulate would eventually give rise to his later work on self efficacy.

In 1963 Bandura published Social Learning and Personality Development. In 1974 Stanford University awarded him an endowed chair and he became David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology. In 1977, Bandura published the ambitious Social Learning Theory, a book that altered the direction psychology took in the 1980s.

In the course of investigating the processes by which modeling alleviates phobic disorders in snake - phobics, Bandura found that self efficacy beliefs (which the phobic individuals had in their own capabilities to alleviate their phobia) mediated changes in behavior and in fear arousal. He then launched a major program of research examining the influential role of self referent thought in psychological functioning. Although he continued to explore and write on theoretical problems relating to myriad topics, from the late 1970s he devoted much attention to exploring the role that self efficacy beliefs play in human functioning.

In 1986 Bandura published Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory, a book in which he offered a social cognitive theory of human functioning that accords a central role to cognitive, vicarious, self regulatory and self reflective processes in human adaptation and change. This theory has its roots in an agentic perspective that views people as self organizing, proactive, self reflecting and self regulating, not just as reactive organisms shaped by environmental forces or driven by inner impulses. Self - efficacy: The exercise of control was published in 1997.

Bandura received more than sixteen honorary degrees, including those from the University of British Columbia, Alfred University, the University of Rome, the University of Lethbridge, the University of Salamanca in Spain, Indiana University, the University of New Brunswick, Penn State University, Leiden University, and Freie Universitat Berlin, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Universitat Jaume I in Spain, the University of Athens and the University of Catania. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980. In 1999 he received the Thorndike Award for Distinguished Contributions of Psychology to Education from the American Psychological Association, and in 2001, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy. He was also the recipient of the Outstanding Lifetime Contribution to Psychology Award from the American Psychological Association and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Western Psychological Association, the James McKeen Cattell Award from the American Psychological Society, and the Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Lifetime Contribution to Psychological Science from the American Psychological Foundation. In 2008, he received the Grawemeyer Award for contributions to psychology.

Murray Sidman is a pioneering behavioral scientist, best known for Sidman Avoidance, also called 'free - operant avoidance', in which an individual learns to avoid an aversive stimulus by remembering to produce the response without any other stimulus. Sidman's explanation of free - operant avoidance is an alternative to the Miller - Mowrer two - process theory of avoidance.

Methodologically, a 'Sidman avoidance procedure' is an experiment in which the subject is periodically presented with an aversive stimulus, such as the introduction of carbon dioxide or an electric shock, unless they produce a particular response, such as pulling a plunger, which delays the stimulus by a certain amount of time.

His work on methodology for behavioral psychologists was the standard textbook in its field.

Sidman earned his PhD at Columbia in 1952 under the advisorship of William N. Schoenfeld,and  worked at many research institutions including Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. He was professor emeritus at Northeastern University.

Murray Sidman initiated the research on stimulus equivalence, and made important contributions to the field; this is described in Equivalence relations and behavior: A research story. His book Coercion and its fallout is often required reading when discussing ethics and behavior analysis.

Sidman has contributed three major publications to the field of Applied Behavior Analysis. First, his most classic book "Coercion and It's Fallout". This book set the groundwork for understand how everyone uses coercion and how to ethically use it to get meaningful behavioral changes. His second book is entitled "Equivalence Relations and Behavior: A Research Story. Finally his third major work is titled "Tactics of Scientific Research" which has become a staple for research based Psychology.

Below is a brief biographical sketch from the 2004 CALABA program, where he was an invited speaker:

Dr. Sidman received a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University in 1952 and went on to make contributions of enormous significance to the field of behavior analysis. He has held positions as a Research Psychologist at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the E.K. Shriver Center for Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities, where he served as director of the Behavioral Sciences Department. Dr. Sidman has taught countless students at Columbia University, Harvard Medical School, University of Nevada, Northeastern University, and Johns Hopkins University. His influence is international, as Dr. Sidman has held academic appointments at the University of São Paulo in Brasil, Keio University in Tokyo, Japan and the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Dr. Sidman’s publications in peer - refereed journals number close to 100 and have defined much of our current understanding of stimulus control, stimulus equivalence, and avoidance behavior. His 1960 text, Tactics of Scientific Research, is considered the first primer on within - subject research methodology. It is a classic that is still used today. Other contributions have extended to important social problems. The second edition of his book Coercion and Its Fallout was published in 2000, and his treatment of “Terrorism as Behavior” is in press in Behavior and Social Issues. Dr. Sidman is currently at work on his newest text, Applied Behavior Analysis: How and Why.