Bandura Bobo Doll

10 Key excerpts on "Bandura Bobo Doll"

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  eBook - ePub

  Developmental Psychology

  Revisiting the Classic Studies

  • Alan M Slater, Paul C Quinn, Alan M Slater, Paul C Quinn(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Many researchers modified key aspects of the original Bobo doll study in subsequent investigations designed to test the extent to which children would learn aggressive behavior in a variety of contexts and under varying conditions. For example, Bandura, Ross, and Ross (1963) themselves followed up on their initial study by conducting a similar study in which children watched a film of an adult model aggressing against a Bobo doll or a film that included an adult dressed as a cat with cartoon features aggressing against a Bobo doll. Children who had watched the films of aggressive acts were as likely to imitate the acts of aggression as were those children who had viewed the live model acting out the aggression, and all three experimental groups engaged in more aggressive behavior than the control group that had not witnessed an aggressive model.

  Along with questions regarding ethics, generalizability, and validity, some critics have questioned whether the Bobo doll study constitutes evidence regarding children’s imitation of aggression or merely behaviors the children regarded as play. This argument hinges on how aggression is defined. Contemporary researchers generally define aggression as an act perpetrated by one individual that is intended to cause physical, psychological, or social harm to another (Ostrov, Kamper-DeMarco, Blakely-McClure, Perry, & Mutignani, 2019). It is plausible that the intention to harm was missing from children’s imitative behaviors toward the Bobo doll, even if by their nature (e.g., kicking, hitting) they seem aggressive. Regardless of whether the children were engaging in aggressive acts with the intent to cause harm or merely playing, the main takeaway message remains the same. Namely, children can learn to engage in new behaviors by observing and imitating models, even if no rewards or punishments are attached to the behaviors.

  Conclusion: How the Study Advanced Thinking, but How Thinking has Subsequently Advanced

  B

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  Theories of Personality

  • Duane P. Schultz; Sydney Ellen Schultz, Duane Schultz, Sydney Schultz(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 13: Albert Bandura: Modeling Theory 343 Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. before and to strengthen or weaken existing responses. Bandura ’ s now-classic demon-stration of modeling involves the Bobo doll, an inflatable plastic figure about 4 feet tall (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963). In Bandura ’ s studies, preschool children watched an adult hit and kick Bobo. While attacking the doll, the adult model shouted, “ Sock him in the nose! ” and “ Throw him in the air! ” When the children were left alone with the doll, they modeled their behavior after the example they had just witnessed. Their behavior was compared with that of a control group of children who had not seen the model attack the Bobo doll. The experi-mental group was found to be twice as aggressive as the control group. The intensity of the aggressive behavior remained the same in the experimental sub-jects whether the model was seen live, on television, or as a cartoon character. The effect of the model in all three media was to elicit aggressive behavior that was not displayed with the same strength by children who had not seen the models. Other Modeling Studies In his early research on the impact of modeling on learning, Bandura compared the behavior of parents of two groups of children (Bandura & Walters, 1963). One group consisted of highly aggressive children, the other of more inhibited children. According to Bandura ’ s theory, the children ’ s behavior should reflect their parents ’ behavior.

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  Learning Theories in Childhood

  • Colette Gray, Sean MacBlain(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Of interest was the fact that the children were not being rewarded for hitting the doll. They were in fact engaging in behaviours they had observed but that had not been reinforced. Learning was, therefore, taking place, not as behaviourists of the time would have argued, as a result of reinforcement, but as a result of observation. Bandura believed that the stimulus–response explanation of learning proposed by the early behaviourists was overly simplistic and did not go far enough in explaining human behaviour and emotions. Take time to look at the video clip link below, in which Albert Bandura explains his thinking behind the Bobo doll experiment and offers some original ‘clips’ taken from the initial experiments. Weblink ‘Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment’, available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmBqwWlJg8U (accessed 11.4.15). Whilst Bandura acknowledged that classical and operant conditioning (see Chapter 4) could go some way in explaining social learning, he also argued that there were two other factors that were of great importance, namely imitation and identification. Bandura suggested that both of these factors provided for acceler- ated social learning in children. With the first of these, children imitate the behaviours of others whilst, with the second, new learning is assimilated into existing concepts that have already been internalized by the child. In this way, Bandura argued, whole patterns of behaving become internalized by children such that they then act upon new situations in the way they think that the adults from whom they have modelled their behaviour would behave. In the case of Tracey and Ben, they have internalized quite different patterns of behaviour that have been modelled by the adults in their families and by significant others they have come into contact with during those crucial pre-school years, and their first years of schooling.

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  Essential Research Methods in Psychology

  • Philip Banyard, Belinda Winder, Christine Norman, Gayle Dillon, Philip Banyard, Belinda Winder, Christine Norman, Gayle Dillon(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  controlled experiment to investigate if social behaviours, such as aggression, could be learned by the observation and imitation of others. This experimental study by Bandura et al. (1961) focused on the transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. In the context of psychology, a model is a person or persons which performs behaviours in psychological studies. Such behaviours may or may not be imitated by the participants in the study.

  Figure 2.3 Bobo doll

  © Okhanm, Wikimedia Commons

  Interesting fact

  ‘Psychology Pop Idol’

  Psychologists of the 20th century were put to a popularity contest to determine who were the most influential psychologists of that period. The rankings were based on three criteria: number of journal citations; number of introductory textbook citations; and the survey responses of 1725 members of the American Psychological Society, who were asked to list who they felt were the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. Albert Bandura placed fourth on that list, very impressive! Can you think of other prominent psychologists who may have appeared high on this list? The full list can be found in Haggbloom et al. (2002) in the Review of General Psychology, 6, 2.

  The theory which the study was designed to test is the

  Social Learning Theory

  . Social Learning Theory argues behaviour can be learned through

  vicarious learning

  , which is learning via the observation of others’ behaviours. Social Learning Theory emphasises the importance of observing and modelling behaviours, attitudes, and the emotional reactions of others. This may appear more obvious today, but up until the point of Bandura and colleagues’ Bobo doll studies,

  behaviourism

  was the dominant psychological paradigm in the 20th century.

  Behaviourism emphasised the role of environmental factors in shaping behaviour, to the near exclusion of innate or cognitive factors. Behaviourists argued that we learn new behaviour through classical and operant conditioning, as demonstrated in the seminal works of Pavlov (1927) and Skinner (1953) respectively. Essentially, the behaviourist approach argued that people learned through performing their own actions and that the subsequent positive or negative feedback they received would shape future behaviour. Bandura spotted a problem with this way of learning, arguing that learning would be extremely laborious and dangerous if individuals had to learn all behaviour via their own actions (Bandura & Walters, 1977). Imagine if you were a child having to learn the correct way to cross a busy road safely through trial and error learning! Instead, he argued we are able to first observe how this is done successfully and then imitate that behaviour. Therefore, Bandura argued that learning is not purely behavioural but that it is a cognitive process that takes place in a social context.

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  OCR Psychology

  AS Core Studies and Psychological Investigations

  • Philip Banyard, Cara Flanagan(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  matched participants design.
• The effects of model’s gender. Some children watched a male model and others watched a female model.
• The effects of child’s gender. Half the participants were boys and half were girls.
Phase 2: aggression arousal
The children were taken to another room where they were then allowed to play with some attractive toys. This play was abruptly stopped in order to make the children feel frustrated.
Phased 3: test for delayed imitation The children were taken to another room where they were observed playing with toys, including the Bobo doll.
Key term: social learning
In this article Bandura et al. refer to ‘imitative learning’, i.e. learning to perform a new behaviour as a consequence of imitating a model’s behaviour. This later became known as social learning because learning takes place in a social context – it is ‘social’ because it involves watching other people.

Results

The children who observed the aggressive model were more likely to exhibit the same specific acts of violence shown by the model than the other two groups, for example they said ‘pow’ and hit the doll with a mallet.

The children who observed the aggressive model were later generally more aggressive, although the difference between groups was very small. The boys were more affected by same-sex models than the girls were. Both boys and girls were more affected by the male models in terms of physical (but not verbal) aggressiveness.

Discussion

The results showed that children do imitate behaviour of models beyond the specific situation where the behaviour was viewed. The aggressive models affected behaviour in two ways: they provided information about specific behaviours and also generally increased levels of aggression. Male models appear to have a stronger influence possibly because aggression is a masculine-type behaviour and therefore boys and girls attend more readily to male models.
A Bobo doll is an inflatable doll about five-foot tall. There is a weight in the bottom that makes it bob back up when you knock it down.