Comparison Of Albert Bandura And Bobo Dolls

In 1961 a man named Albert Bandura conducted and experiment that not only showed but proved that children learned by observing and then imitating adult behavior. This experiment was conducted at Stanford University where Bandura was a professor. They used 36 boys and 36 girls from the Stanford University Nursery School between the ages of 3 and 6 years old. There were two inflatable dolls called Bobo Dolls used for this experiment. These were the kind of dolls you could hit and knock over and they would stand back up. The children were all divided into three groups. Each group contained 12 boys and 12 girls. The three groups were presented to three different conditions. The first group of children was presented with an aggressive model. This
Even though not much can be proven from this one experiment, we need to watch the way we act around children because children imitate what they see, and repeat what they hear whether either are good or bad. Of course we all would hope that our children would only pick up the good in us, and grow up to have all our best qualities and more. Some things are out of our control. We all have our bad days, where everything and everybody makes us mad, and we cannot help to be rude even though we don’t mean it. Or we might accidentally hit our toe on the corner of the bed, and start cursing at the bed. These are times where we have little to no control, and aren’t paying attention to who is watching. In my situation my babies are always around me observing me. I know they feel when I’m mad or frustrated and have noticed they react to stressful situations the way I do. There are different ways to handle stressful situations and ultimately they imitate the way I react. In Bandura’s book “Social Learning Theory, he states that social assumes that modeling influences produce learning principally through their informative functions and those observers acquire mainly symbolic representations of modeled activities rather than specific stimulus-response associations (6). What I get from this is
Physical aggression is viewed as highly masculine, therefore this experiment also showed that there was sex discrimination, such as remarks being made saying that ladies are supposed to act like ladies, not aggressively (Bandura 44). There were shocked reactions as to how and what the aggressive female models were acting like. It was being said that she was acting like a man. The male model aggression was seen as it was more appropriate since he was a man. Both the boys and girls were acting as if it was okay for the male models to act aggressively. Even compliments were being given to such behavior like, “He’s a good socker,” or “The man is a strong fighter.” (Bandura 44) As an adult I don’t think it’s appropriate for either sex to act aggressively and in turn imitate this type of behavior. I can see why children would see it the way they did though. Men are seen as being strong, defenders, and okay to be mean, while women are seen as being warm, loving, and nurturing. “Results revealed that children exposed to aggressive models reproduced considerably more aggressive behaviors resembling that of the models, and that their mean aggression scores were significantly higher than subjects in the nonaggressive and control groups.”(Artino 4) I personally don’t need these results to understand that they are true. Now a days I work in a