The CBC Radio 1 program “The Sunday Edition” interviewed Albert Bandura yesterday morning. The occasion for the interview was Bandura’s having been awarded the $200,000 Grawemeyer Award for Psychology. Grawemeyer awards have previously gone to such psychological luminaries as Aaron Beck, Elizabeth Loftus, Amos Tversky, and Daniel Kahneman (also a Nobel Prize winner).

The introduction to the CBC interview described Bandura thus:

The man considered to be the world’s greatest living psychology theorist is Canadian-born Albert Bandura. Not only is he ranked fourth on the list of all time great psychologists, behind the likes of Freud, B.F. Skinner and Jean Piaget, but Albert Bandura has just won a two hundred thousand dollar prize for his life’s work. Impressive accolades for a farmboy from an immigrant family who settled in Mundare Alberta.

Bandura’s pioneering work in the 1960’s led to his theories on social cognitive behaviour and self efficacy–the notions that it is not only a person’s nature that shapes personality and actions–as past theorists believed. Instead, he proved that behaviour is shaped by the combination of a person’s experiences, the influence of mentors, innate makeup and by one’s own decisions to act, or not act, on learned values.

Albert Bandura is eighty two years old, a professor emeritus at Stanford University in California and very much still involved in the application of his theories to present day social and political issues all over the world.

“The Sunday Edition” posts audio files of many of its interviews here. Although this particular interview is not posted yet, I will update this page if it does.

See also a Vancouver Sun article on the same topic.

===

UPDATE: CBC has posted audio files of a number of items from the 6 January show, and the Bandura interview is unfortunately not among them.