Albert Bandura’s research while affiliated with Stanford University and other places

The present paper documents the influential role played by selective moral disengagement for social practices that cause widespread human harm and degrade the environment. Disengagement of moral self-sanctions enables people to pursue detrimental practices freed from the restraint of self-censure. This is achieved by investing ecologically harmful practices with worthy purposes through social, national, and economic justifications; enlisting exonerative comparisons that render the practices righteous; use of sanitising and convoluting language that disguises what is being done; reducing accountability by displacement and diffusion of responsibility; ignoring, minimising, and disputing harmful effects; and dehumanising and blaming the victims and derogating the messengers of ecologically bad news. These psychosocial mechanisms operate at both the individual and social systems levels. of social cognitive theory, which is rooted in an agentic perspective. His landmark book, Social Foundations of Thought and Action: a Social Cognitive Theory, provides the conceptual framework for this theory. In his book, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, he presents the definitive exposition of the centrality of people's beliefs in their personal and collective efficacy in exercising some measure of control over their self-development, adaptation and change. He was elected to the presidency of the American Psychological Association and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

This article presents an agentic theory of human development, adaptation, and change. The evolutionary emergence of advanced symbolizing capacity enabled humans to transcend the dictates of their immediate environment and made them unique in their power to shape their life circumstances and the courses their lives take. In this conception, people are contributors to their life circumstances, not just products of them. Social cognitive theory rejects a duality between human agency and social structure. People create social systems, and these systems, in turn, organize and influence people's lives. This article discusses the core properties of human agency, the different forms it takes, its ontological and epistemological status, its development and role in causal structures, its growing primacy in the coevolution process, and its influential exercise at individual and collective levels across diverse spheres of life and cultural systems. © 2006 Association for Psychological Science.

In this commentary, I review diverse lines of research conducted at both the macrosocial and microbehavioral level that dispute the view that cruelty is inherently gratifying. Expressions of pain and suffering typically inhibit rather than reinforce cruel conduct in humans. With regard to functional value, cruelty has diverse personal and social effects, not just the alluring benefits attributed to it.

The present study examined the relation between disengagement of moral self-sanclions and support of military force. The modes of moral disengagement included moral sanctioning of lethal means, disavowal of personal responsibility for detrimental effects accompanying military campaigns, minimization of civilian casualties, and attribution of blame and dehumanization of one's foes. The respondents were drawn nationally through a random digit dialing interview system. Partway during this nationwide study the country experienced the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 terrorist strikes raised the level of moral disengagement for the use of military force compared to the pre-strike level. The higher the moral disengagement the stronger the public support for immediate retaliatory strikes against suspected terrorist sanctuaries abroad and for aerial bombardment of Iraq. Moral disengagement completely mediated the effect of the terrorist attack. Moreover, moral disengagement completely mediated the effect of sociodemographic factors on support of military force against terrorist sanctuaries and partially mediated the effect on military force against Iraq.

The present study tested the proposition that disengagement of moral self-sanctions enables prison personnel to carry out the death penalty. Three subgroups of personnel in penitentiaries located in three Southern states were assessed in terms of eight mechanisms of moral disengagement. The personnel included the execution teams that carry out the executions; the support teams that provide solace and emotional support to the families of the victims and the condemned inmate; and prison guards who have no involvement in the execution process. The executioners exhibited the highest level of moral, social, and economic justifications, disavowal of personal responsibility, and dehumanization. The support teams that provide the more humane services disavowed moral disengagement, as did the noninvolved guards but to a lesser degree than the support teams.

In this prospective study, we tested a structural model in which adolescents' perceived self-efficacy to manage parental relationships affected their satisfaction with family life both directly, and indirectly, through its impact on family practices. Findings based on 380 Italian adolescents showed that perceived filial self-efficacy was linked directly and indirectly to satisfaction with family life, and that these relations held both concurrently and longitudinally. In particular, the greater adolescents perceived their self-efficacy, the more they reported open communication with their parents, the more accepting they were of their parents' monitoring of their own activities outside the home and the less inclined they were to get into escalative discord over disagreements. Regardless of whether perceived filial self-efficacy was placed in the conceptual structure as a contributor to the quality of family interactions or as a partial product of family functioning, it consistently predicted satisfaction with family life.

The recent years have witnessed a major change in the conception of health from a disease model to a health model. It emphasizes health promotion rather than mainly disease management. By managing their health habits, people can live longer, healthier, and retard the process of aging (Bandura, 2004; Fuchs, 1974). Self-man-agement is good medicine. If the huge benefits of these few habits were put into a pill it would be declared a scientific milestone in the field of medicine. But health habits are neither commercially marketable nor offer an effortless quick fix, so health gatekeepers are disinclined to write behavioral prescriptions. Current health practices focus heavily on the medical supply side. The escalating pressure on health systems is to reduce, ration, and delay health services to contain health costs. The days for the supply-side health system are limited, however. People are living longer. This creates more time for minor dysfunctions to develop into dis-abling chronic diseases requiring costly health services. In addition, the combined effect of growing public interest in health matters linked to expensive health care technologies, and the medicalization of problems of living with aggressive public marketing of drug remedies for them, is adding to the burdensome costs. Demand is overwhelming supply. The social cognitive approach, which is rooted in an agentic model of health promo-tion, focuses on the demand side (Bandura, 1997, 2004). It promotes effective self-management of health habits that keep people healthy through their life course. Psychosocial factors influence whether the extended life is lived efficaciously or with debility, pain, and dependence (Fries & Crapo, 1981). Aging populations will force societies to redirect their efforts from supply-side practices to demand-side remedies. Otherwise, nations will be swamped with staggering health costs that con-sume valuable resources needed for national programs.