Bandura Social Learning

How research by Bandura and colleagues on social learning and aggression has contributed to our understanding of children’s behaviour.
The report objectives:
• Clarify the work of Bandura, Ross and Ross
• Describe the “Bobo Doll” experiment
• Evaluate the “Bobo Doll” experiment and is relevance to the activity leaders
• Social learning and Imitative behaviour on children
• Conclusion

Achievements
As interpreted by Oates 2012 Albert Bandura was especially interested in social learning and perhaps best known for his studies of observational learning. Bandura and his colleagues anticipated the following “children were likely to imitate aggressive acts they have observed under certain conditions” (Oates 2012 pg 109). Social learning
is also a process to child development; children develop through learning from other people around them. In particular by observation and imitation of role models. To support their theory Albert Bandura and his colleagues conducted an experiment which became known as the Bobo Dolls experiment and carried out in 1963. This experiment plays a significative role in analyzing aggression shown by children after witnessing aggression and for a teacher social learning plays an important role in the classrooms.
The Bobo dolls experiment
Bandura, Ross and Ross tested 36 boys and 36 girls aged between 3 to 6 years old. The role models were one male adult and one female adult. Under controlled conditions, Bandura then arranged for 24 boys and girls to watch a male or female model carrying violent acts towards a toy called a 'Bobo doll '. Another 24 children were exposed to a non-aggressive model and the final 24 child were used as a control group and not exposed to any model at all.
Evaluation of results for the activity leaders:
The end result of the experiment showed that the children in the three groups exposed to aggressive acts, demonstrated more aggressive behaviours than those in the group who didn’t. It also showed that it made no variation if the aggression was witnessed on T.V or in real life. The result also showed when the aggression was witnessed on the T.V there was no variation if the aggression was carried out by a real person or cartoon like character (Oates, 2012).
Two main mechanisms of children leaning behaviour have been identified as follow:
Priming:”Viewing an aggressive model creates memories of this behaviour, and associated emotions and responses .this means that, when similar setting or situation arises, a person’s more likely to respond on accordance with the sore memory (Berkowitz, 1993)” (Oates, 2012, pg.124).
Scripting: “Rich packages of sequences of behaviours, intentions, meanings and emotions, which offer scenarios to deal with situations that arise in everyday life” (Oates, 2012, pg.125) such as going to the doctor.
It could be argued that the models did have an effect on the children’s subsequent behavior in this case; models are individuals and individuals that children can be influenced by, individual’s children can see as role models such as parents within the family, characters on children’s TV, friends within their groups and teachers at school. These models also provide examples of masculine and feminine behaviors for them observe and imitate.
Teachers can take this learning process into account to effectively approach imitative behavior by one of their children students. Children can learn imitative behavior from other children for example therefore a misbehaving child must be dealt with and it must be clear to the rest of the class that the behavior is not rewarded, on the other way around If a teacher sees a little girl helping one of her colleagues in a team work situation for instance and says “what a kind girl you are”, this is rewarding for the child and makes it more likely that she will repeat the behavior. Her behavior has been reinforced in this case by her model the
teacher.

Conclusion
As with any experiment, the Bobo doll study raised some ethical questions for example:
- Weather the children suffered any long term consequences as result of the study.
- Should also be taken in consideration that acting violently toward a doll is a lot different that displaying aggression or violence against another human being in a real world situation.
- The children could only be trying to please the adults involved in the experiment.
- All children involved enrolled at the Stanford University Nursery School in this case their social background could not be as diverse has it need to.
However the experiment has been important in understanding children’s behaviour it is not certain that all children will behave aggressively by witnessing aggressive acts socially but it is likely that children observing an adult model utilizing violence are more likely to believe that this type of behaviour is normal and acceptable The fact that they so closely imitated the models certainly shows that children watch what you are doing and are learning even when you don 't think they are.
Words: 813
References
Oates, J (2012) ‘Learning from watching’ Brace, N., Byford, J., Investigating Psychology, Milton Keynes, The Open University.