Albert Bandura's Influence On Aggressive Behavior

Human beings have the innate tendency to mimic the people or situations surrounding them. This classifies as observational learning, the process of acquiring information solely from observing other individuals. Susceptibility is especially high during childhood years, when brains are like sponges, absorbing knowledge and experience. In the 1960s, Albert Bandura, a world-renowned psychologist, launched an experiment that looked to find whether or not individuals’ behavior is influenced by observing aggressive models. The experiment tested 24 preschool children under 3 conditions: one group was exposed to models aggressively playing with an inflatable toy, another group was exposed to a non-violent play with the toy, and the final group was the control group, therefore, had no exposure to any models.
While this experiment did help in the understanding of the influence in aggressive behavior, Bandura overlooked several factors that may have altered the results of the experiment. For example, the children’s prior aggression levels as well as ethnicity and economic status, given that all children used in the trial were parents from Stanford, in other words, white, in the upper-middle class and highly educated. Since this experiment, theories have evolved to prove that not only do aggressive models have an influence in behavior but also various media forms, such as television and video