Bandura (1961)

What is the other name for this study?

Bashing Bobo Study

What theory in the sociocultural approach does this study relate to?

Social Cognitive Theory

What is the general aim of the study?

To demonstrate if children are passive witnesses to aggressive behavior by an adult, they will imitate this aggressive behaviour when given the opportunity

What 2 predictions did the study make? (aim)

• children exposed to aggressive models will reproduce aggressive acts resembling those of the model

• children will imitate the behavior of a same-sex model to a greater degree than a model of the opposite sex

Methodology (2)

• laboratory experiment

• matched-pair design

Participants (2)

• 36 boys and 36 girls (72 in total)

• average age of 52 months

What were the 3 major conditions?

• control group

• group exposed to an aggressive model

• group exposed to a non-aggressive model

What conditions were the participants further divided into?

• further subdivided by gender and the gender of the model that they were exposed to

what were the 3 IVs?

• type of aggression observed 

• gender of the child

• gender of the model

What were the 2 DVs?

• level of aggressive behaviour 

• type of aggressive behaviour

How many experimental conditions in total and how many children allocated to each?

• 8 experimental conditions

• 6 children were allocated to each

What did the researchers do before the actual experiment?

• pretest

• assessing their aggressiveness

How did the researchers pre-test the children and assessed their aggressiveness?

• 2 researchers observed the children in the nursery and judged their aggressiveness on a 5-point scale

  • rating scales assessed their level of physical aggression, verbal aggression, and aggression towards inanimate objects

• Researchers compared their observations to control for inter-rater reliability

What did the pre-test control for?

• controlled for level of aggression

• established a baseline of aggression for all participants

• allowed their to be an equally distributed amount of participants with various levels of aggression in each condition

What did the children in the control group do?

• children were taken to the play room which contained toys and Bobo

How were the children tested and how many stages were in this procedure?

• Children were tested individually

• There were 3 stages

Explain stage 1

• Child was taken to a playroom

• one area contained toys and items that children liked

• another area there was the adult model and Bobo (an inflatable doll)

• Non-aggressive condition

  • model played with blocks ignoring bobo

• Aggressive condition

  • after a minute of playing with blocks, the  model beats up bobo in a scripted way 

  • displayed both physical and verbal aggression

• After 10 minutes, the child was taken to another play room

Explain stage 2

• Child was subjected to “mild aggression arousal” (ragebaited)

• The child was take to another play room with very attractive toys, but after they started to play with them, the researcher took them away

Explain Stage 3

• The child was taken to another playroom that contained a variety of toys both non-aggressive (bears, crayons, etc) and aggressive toys (mallet, toy gun, and Bobo)

• The experimenter stayed in the room (otherwise the child would leave) 

• kept in this room for 20 minutes and observed through a one way mirror

  • observations were made at 5 minute intervals

What observations the researchers recorded as imitations and not imitations? (Stage 3)

Imitation

• Imitative physical aggression 

• imitative verbal aggression

• imitative non-aggressive responses

Not an imitation

• punching bobo

• non-imitative physical and verbal aggression

• aggressive gunplay

Results (4)

• children who saw the aggressive model showed more aggressive behaviours than children who did not see the model 

• boys were more aggressive than girls

• boys in the aggressive conditions showed more aggression if the model was male opposed to female

• girls in the aggressive condition showed more physical aggression if the model was male but more verbal aggression if the model was female

Strenght(s):

High internal validity

• controlled to level of aggression using matched pair designs

Construct validity

• shows that aggression may be learned, but it does not study whether aggression is innate 

• It is not truly a counter-argument to the theory that aggression has biological origins

Limitations(s):

Low ecological validity 

• situation is highly controlled

• not normal for a child to be left alone with stranger in this way 

Low generalizability 

• extremely small sample size 

• all children of people working at Stanford University 

Ethical Concerns

• by exposing children to adult violence against Bobo

• This study is cross-sectional, looking only at aggression exhibited as a result of seeing the adult attack bobo

• But it did not monitor long-term effects on the children

• It can be argued that the children experienced undue stress and there was a potential for long-term psychological effects on their behavior