CONCEPT
Reciprocal Determinism
Albert Bandura’s model of the human person as neither the passive product of environment nor the sovereign author of behavior—but as a participant in a triadic system where person, behavior, and environment continuously shape each other, with no factor holding fixed priority.
The behaviorist account of the human being is elegant and wrong in the same way: it reduces the person to an input-output device, stimuli in, responses out, with no intervening psychological agency that modifies the relationship between them. Albert Bandura’s reciprocal determinism was the systematic demolition of this account. The person brings to every situation cognitive factors—beliefs, expectations,
self-efficacy judgments—that determine which aspects of the environment register as relevant and which behavioral options are available. The behavior, once enacted, modifies both the person and the environment. The environment, thus modified, presents new information that updates the person’s beliefs. The three vertices of the triangle rotate together: none is merely an input to the others; each is simultaneously cause and effect. In the context of the AI transition, reciprocal determinism exposes why interventions aimed at any single vertex fail. The organization that changes only the environment—deploying new tools—will find that the person’s beliefs mediate the