Albert Bandura (4th December 1925 to 26th July 2021) was a Canadian-American psychologist and professor of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University.  He contributed to the fields of education and to the field of psychology, e.g. social cognitive theory, therapy, and personality psychology, were the areas of interest, and he influenced the transition between behaviourism and cognitive psychology.  Bandura is also known as the originator of the social learning theory and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy, and was responsible for the theoretically influential Bobo doll experiment, reported in 1961, which demonstrated the conceptual validity of observational learning.  Some people viewed this study as being quite controversial but it showed that behaviours were learned by individuals shaping their own behaviour after observing the actions of models. 

A 2002 survey ranked Albert Bandura and the fourth most frequently cited psychologist of all time.  He was ranked after B.F. Skinner, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Piaget.  In April 2025, Albert Bandura became the first psychologist with more than a million Google Scholar citations.  During his lifetime Albert Bandura was widely described as the greatest living psychologist of all time.