Bandura - Bobo doll experiemmt with vicarious reinforcement

Aim?

To investigate whether reinforcement of the punishment of an aggressive model would influence the aggression displayed in children as a response to frustration.

Sample?

33 girls and 33 boys, approx 3-5 years old, selected from the Stanford University Nursery

Conditions?

• Model reward condition: the children saw a second adult praise the model for their aggression with a drink and a chocolate

• Model punished condition: the children saw a second adult disapprove of the model, saying ‘you big bully, I won’t tolerate it’ and hit them with a rolled up newspaper

• Control - no consequences condition: the model was neither reinforced or punished

Procedure?

After being sorted into their conditions, the children followed the research into the room. While they waited, they watched some TV, where one of three programmes was shown (model rewarded, model punished, control). Afterwards, the children were deliberately frustrated by being taken into a playroom with toys they weren’t allowed to play with, before being taken to a playroom with toys they could play with - including the bobo doll. Researchers used time sampling to record behaviours observed through a one-way mirror at 5 second intervals for 20 minutes. After, a reward (the chocolate and drink) was offered to all of the children if they demonstrated aggressive behaviours.

Findings?

• Children in the model punished condition were less aggressive than in the other two conditions.

• Once the reward was offered to the children, the differences between the groups were wiped out. This increased the aggressiveness scores in all groups significantly.

Conclusions?

• Vicarious punishment reduces imitated aggression

• The promise of reinforcement, direct reinforcement, is the most powerfully influence on aggression

Strength?

Two observers were used to record the behaviour of the children in each condition. The scores from the two observers were checked and it was found that there was a high level of agreement between their results recording the levels of physical and verbal aggression imitated, therefore, the results had interater reliability. Therefore, it is likely that the results from these studies are reliable as they are in agreement.

Weakness?

All of the behaviours observed were from an artificial task (lacking mundane realism) in a laboratory setting. This means that the behaviours observed may have been artificial. For example, children are rarely left to play alone and it is likely that in a real situation, parents or teachers would intervene to stop any negative behaviour before it became aggressive. Since the children in the study were not told that the behaviour was ‘wrong’, they may have felt that they were supposed to continue and therefore may have been exhibiting demand characteristics. Therefore, researchers may not have observed real life aggression at all, meaning it is difficult fi make conclusions about how children may behave in real-life situations, such as viewing aggressive behaviour on TV.