Albert Bandura's Bobo Experiment
Albert Bandura was born in a small Canadian town called Mundare on December 4, 1925. His parents came from Eastern Europe, his father from Poland and mother from Ukraine. He is the youngest of six children and the only son. Before Bandura was born, a sister died of the flu and a brother died in a hunting accident. The school that Bandura was the only school in the whole town, it was both the elementary and high school. The school was very short on teachers, and all of the high school curriculum was taught by only two teachers. This made students take charge of their education if they truly wanted to learn. Bandura knew that the tools of self-directedness would help him later in life. His parents always encouraged him to get out of their small
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This study was made to investigate if social behaviors can be obtained from observation and imitation. In this study, he had 72 children broken up into three conditions, aggressive, non-aggressive, and no model. In the aggressive group, children watched a model attack a Bobo doll with both physical and verbal abuse and in the non-aggressive group, children watched a model play with toys and ignore the Bobo doll. Then the child is put into a room full of toys and allowed to play with them. Two minutes later, the child is told that they can no longer play with these toys. The child is then taken into another room with both aggressive and non-aggressive toys. The observers then watch the child and record any imitative aggression, non-imitative aggression and partial imitation. The results were that exposure to aggressive modeling increase aggressive behaviors and then lead to children assaulting the Bobo doll with gun or other toys that was never modeled for them before. This experiment then help Bandura develop his idea of the Social Learning Theory. This theory agrees with the learning theories of classical conditioning and operant conditioning but adds two important ideas that behavior is learned from one’s environment through observation and mediating process occur between stimuli and responses. The Social Learning Theory is seen as a bridge between traditional learning theory and cognitive approach. Unlike Skinner, Bandura believe that humans do not observe a behavior and automatically imitate it, there is some thought beforehand and this is called mediational processes. This occurs between the behavior (stimulus) and the imitating it or not (response). Bandura is also known for creating the definition of self-efficacy. Self- efficacy is the belief that a person has in them self to accomplish a task or be successful. (Bandura, 1961; Bandura, 1977; Bandura, 1997; The Bobo
This study was made to investigate if social behaviors can be obtained from observation and imitation. In this study, he had 72 children broken up into three conditions, aggressive, non-aggressive, and no model. In the aggressive group, children watched a model attack a Bobo doll with both physical and verbal abuse and in the non-aggressive group, children watched a model play with toys and ignore the Bobo doll. Then the child is put into a room full of toys and allowed to play with them. Two minutes later, the child is told that they can no longer play with these toys. The child is then taken into another room with both aggressive and non-aggressive toys. The observers then watch the child and record any imitative aggression, non-imitative aggression and partial imitation. The results were that exposure to aggressive modeling increase aggressive behaviors and then lead to children assaulting the Bobo doll with gun or other toys that was never modeled for them before. This experiment then help Bandura develop his idea of the Social Learning Theory. This theory agrees with the learning theories of classical conditioning and operant conditioning but adds two important ideas that behavior is learned from one’s environment through observation and mediating process occur between stimuli and responses. The Social Learning Theory is seen as a bridge between traditional learning theory and cognitive approach. Unlike Skinner, Bandura believe that humans do not observe a behavior and automatically imitate it, there is some thought beforehand and this is called mediational processes. This occurs between the behavior (stimulus) and the imitating it or not (response). Bandura is also known for creating the definition of self-efficacy. Self- efficacy is the belief that a person has in them self to accomplish a task or be successful. (Bandura, 1961; Bandura, 1977; Bandura, 1997; The Bobo