Study: Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment On Social Learning

• Pre-testing the children for aggression

  • Observing the children in the nursery and judging their aggressive behaviour on four 5-point rating scales
  • Matching the children in each group so that they had similar levels of aggression in their everyday behaviour
• Testing inter-rater reliability

  • 51 of the children were rated by two observers independently, and their ratings were compared showing a very high reliability correlation (r = 0.89)
• Modeling stage

  1. 24 children watched a male or female model behaving aggressively towards a Bobo doll

  2. 24 children exposed to a non-aggressive model playing in a quiet and subdued manner

  3. 24 children used as control group and not exposed to any model
• Aggression arousal stage

  All children subjected to "mild aggression arousal" - experimenter told child the toys were reserved for other children
• Test for delayed imitation

  Child in a room with aggressive and non-aggressive toys, behaviour observed and rated through one-way mirror for 20 minutes
• Advantages of the experimental method

  • Allows establishing cause and effect
  • Allows precise control of variables
  • Allows replicability
• Many psychologists are very critical of laboratory studies of imitation due to low ecological validity
• Children who had not played with a Bobo Doll before were five times as likely to imitate the aggressive behaviour than those who were familiar with it
• Demonstrations were measured almost immediately, so long-term effects cannot be discovered
• The Bobo doll experiment may have been unethical as we cannot be certain of any long-term consequences for the children