Bandura helped reshape the theoretical landscape of behaviorism and personality by creating his own theory, the social learning theory. Bandura agrees with the fundamental thrust of behaviorism that personality is largely shaped through learning. However, he contends that conditioning is not a mechanical process in which people are passive participants. Bandura’s foremost theoretical contribution has been his description of observational learning, which occurs when an organism’s responding, is influenced by the observation of others. Bandura maintains that people’s characteristics patterns of behavior are shaped by the models that they are exposed to.

In observational learning, a model is a person whose behavior is observed by another. According to social learning theory, models have a great impact on personality development. Children learn to be assertive, conscientious, self-sufficient, and dependable and so on. Bandura discusses how a variety of personal factors (aspects of personality) govern behavior. The factor he has emphasized the most in recent years is self-efficacy, which refers to one’s belief about one’s ability to perform behaviors that should lead to expected outcomes. He claims that when self-efficacy is high, people feel more confident and when self-efficacy is low, people worry. Bandura’s contributions to the personality theory were very important and led to other theories that help shape psychology and other sciences today and the years to come.