In 1941, Miller and Dollard proposed a theory of social learning and imitation that rejected behaviorist notions of associationism in favor of drive reduction principles. It was a theory of learning, however, that failed to take into account the creation of novel responses or the processes of delayed and non-reinforced imitations. In 1963, Bandura and Walters wrote Social Learning and Personality Development, broadening the frontiers of social learning theory with the now familiar principles of observational learning and vicarious reinforcement. By the 1970s, however, Bandura was becoming aware that a key element was missing not only from the prevalent learning theories of the day but from his own social learning theory. In 1977, with the publication of "Self-efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change," he identified the important piece of that missing element—self-beliefs.
With the publication of Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory, Bandura (1986) advanced a view of human functioning that accords a central role to cognitive, vicarious, self-regulatory, and self-reflective processes in human adaptation and change. People are viewed as self-organizing, proactive, self-reflecting and self-regulating rather than as reactive organisms shaped and shepherded by environmental forces or driven by concealed inner impulses. From this theoretical perspective, human functioning is viewed as the product of a dynamic interplay of personal, behavioral, and environmental influences. For example, how people interpret the results of their own behavior informs and alters their environments and the personal factors they possess which, in turn, inform and alter subsequent behavior. This is the foundation of Bandura's (1986) conception of reciprocal determinism, the view that (a) personal factors in the form of cognition, affect, and biological events, (b) behavior, and (c) environmental influences create interactions that result in a triadic reciprocality. Bandura altered the label of his theory from social learning to social "cognitive" both to distance it from prevalent social learning theories of the day and to emphasize that cognition plays a critical role in people's capability to construct reality, self-regulate, encode information, and perform behaviors.