Takes the principles of behaviourism (people are shaped by their environment) and refines it to include the mechanisms of how people (particularly children) learn from others
SLT does not account for innate and biological factors such as the influence of genes, hormones, brain structures on behaviour which limits its scope
Using lab-based research to investigate behaviour learned in social contexts lacks ecological validity as it uses artificial tasks in unnatural settings
The Bobo Doll Study aimed to investigate the effect of observed aggression on children's behaviour and the effect of same-sex modelling on children's aggressive behaviour
Controlled observational study with a standardised procedure which means that the study is replicable and thus could be repeated to test for reliability
Findings fuelled much debate re: exposing children to television violence hence it has good application
Numerous ethical issues: Asking nursery workers to rate childrens' aggression is intrusive and may have encouraged bias, some children were exposed to an aggressive adult which may have alarmed and distressed them, the aggression arousal phase may have upset the children
The experiment only shows short-term effects of observed aggression, making it difficult to see if there are long-term effects too