AO3

• A strength is supporting research from banduras own study

  -In Bandura’s controlled observation children saw an adult (a role model) behave aggressively, both verbally and physically, towards a large inflatable doll, called a Bobo doll.

  -The observers found that children who saw an aggressive model reproduced more of the aggressive acts than children who saw a non-aggressive model.
• What was another finding of the study

  -finding was that the children showed significantly more imitation of a same-sex model, and boys performed more acts of aggression than girls.

  -Bandura’s research confirmed his belief that children learn from their social environment, which provides models of behaviour as well as expectations of appropriate behaviour. The key processes of social learning are observation, imitation and reinforcement.
• A weakness is that a limitation of SLT is that the cognitive mediational processes need to be inferred and cannot be directly measured.

  -Bandura’s description of the cognitive processes is rather vague. We are therefore unable to test or verify the role of mediational processes in social learning theory.
• Another weakness is that SLT research is mainly conducted on children and rarely investigates adult behaviour.

  -However, Phillips (1986) found that following major boxing matches in the US that homicide rates increased. Therefore, demonstrating that adults are also influenced by role models.
• A strength of SLT is that it can be used to explain aggression in all cultures

  -One example of this is of the !Kung San tribe where there very little or no evidence of violence at all.

  -It is suggested that this is put down to child rearing practices as parents do not punish bad behaviour but seek to distract their child’s attention onto something else.

  -This would suggest that we do (or do not) learn aggression by imitating role models.
• A negative criticism is that SLT does not take any biological explanations of aggression into account.

  -Research has found increased levels of dopamine activity were associated with increased aggressive behaviour.

  -Other research has also found that levels of testosterone were positively correlated with levels of aggression.

  -Furthermore, it cannot explain innate behaviours such as Palmar grasp reflex and rooting behaviour in infants.