Albert Bandura, a professor of social science in psychology at Stanford University, is the winner of the 2008 Grawemeyer Award in psychology, the University of Louisville has announced. Mr. Bandura will receive the $200,000 prize for his work to explain human motivation.

Mr. Bandura’s research has focused on the concept of self-efficacy. In various studies, he has found that people’s belief in themselves directly affects which tasks they choose to pursue in life, how hard they work to complete those tasks, and how they feel while doing so. He has also found that people learn by modeling their behavior after others, an observation that helped lead to the development of cognitive behavioral therapy.

The award in psychology is one of five Grawemeyer prizes presented each year in recognition of achievements in the arts, humanities, in social sciences. It is the third Grawemeyer prize to be announced this week. Philip E. Tetlock, a business scholar at the University of California at Berkeley, was named on Tuesday as the winner of the award for “ideas improving world order.” On Monday the composer Peter Lieberson was announced as the winner of the award in music.

The awards were created in 1984 by H. Charles Grawemeyer, an industrialist and a University of Louisville alumnus. More information about the Grawemeyer Awards and the Grawemeyer Foundation at the University of Louisville is available on the organization’s Web site. —Jason M. Breslow