In 1941, Miller and Dollard were the first to propose the theory of social learning that was aimed to distance itself from the behaviorist viewpoint of associationism in order to move forward with principles of drive reduction. This was an innovative theory but failed to take into account observational learning and vicarious reinforcement which Bandura and Walters were able to incorporate in "Social Learning and Personality" in 1963. Bandura, who was the forefront of this theory, spent most of his professional life at Stanford University as a personality theorist investigating hypotheses generated by his social cognitive theory. In the 1970s, Bandura realized that he forgot an important piece to his social learning theory, this was the idea of self-belief. This related directly to the idea of self-efficacy in which Albert Bandura characterized as a personal judgment of “how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations,” (Bandura, 1982). It was Bandura’s goal to understand the degree to which a person believes they hold the power to affect situations that will determine how the person will face challenges and what types of choices they will make. Self-efficacy is derived from four inputs including performance accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological states (Bandura, 1977a, p.195).

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Social learning comes about from the action of observing models which is why it is called observational learning. At the early stages of his career, Bandura found a fascination with the social aspects of learning. "Early theories considered behavior to be a function of the person and their environment or a function of the interaction between the person and their environment," (Zhou and Brown, 2015). It was Bandura who believed that a person's behavior influenced both the environment and the person, and each would affect one another in their own looping system. This interplay in this triangular looping system is called reciprocal determinism which will be explained more in detail later. 

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In 1986, a second book, "Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory, published by Bandura expanded on the Social Learning theory due to his additional thoughts on how cognition plays a major role in encoding and performing behaviors (Zhou and Brown, 2015). This more comprehensive theory revolves around reciprocal determinism where it can be seen that through this reciprocal determinism, Bandura believed that individuals themselves can act as agents of change within their environment, with the countereffect of altering the factors that determine our behavior. So basically, “we have the freedom to influence factors that determine our behavior,” (Zhou and Brown, 2015). Based on the theory, when people observe a model performing a behavior and the consequences of that behavior, they can memorize the sequential sets of events that can be used to further lead this behavior. Bobo Doll experiment shows this very well as one of the Banduras early tests in the 1960s. This shows that we do not spontaneously come up with our own behaviors by trying to succeed or fail in them, but we learn upon the replication of the actions of others.