Tammy Negrette March 23, 2013 Criminal Psychology Bandura Bo-Bo Doll Experiment Albert Bandura theory is that individuals learn behaviors and aggressive behaviors by watching others peoples behaviors. In Bandura’s experiment with the Bo-bo doll the children observe an adult beating the doll because it is an adult they think it is OK so in, turn they repeat the same behavior. Albert Bandura heavily debates that most children will learn and repeat aggressive and especially violent behaviors by observing others who display aggressive and violent types of behaviors. Bandura argues that they will copy the behaviors if watch through personal acts of others, seen in the media or by entertainment observations. Bandura also argues that while children can learn this behavior in the home by watching family members who maybe aggressive or violent and then acting on what they see.
However if this was an adult, like Atticus there would be arguments against him and he might even be punished being against racism such as the trial.” Because you are children and you can understand it”. Harper lee might have added this quote to show that children understand some problems quicker than adults. Besides children won’t lie and there points will always be valid. Adults in America would know
Article 3(Klinger) Children's Perceptions of Aggressive and Gender-Specific Content in toy commercials. All commercials target a certain audience for either boys or girls. In a study from the article, it said that Both girl and boys rated male toys as the more desirable and most aggressive of toys than female ones. This can be concerning since toys for kids are going to appeal to a child differently. A girl could like boy toys more, where a boy could like girl toys.
However, recent increases in crimes against children, has raised concern about their ability to provide accurate eyewitness testimony (Goodman and Reed, 1986). On the contrary, three experiments indicated that ages, 7 to 9 and 10 to 12, have the ability to enhance the accuracy of their testimony by screening out wrong answers under free report conditions (Goldsmith, Koriat, Nakash-Dura, Schneider, 2001). Under these conditions of filtering out the wrong answers were the children able to increase their memory function. Since recall has been found to be more
SLT is supported by Bandura et al (1963), who found that children who observed an adult role model behaving aggressively towards a Bobo doll were more likely to reproduce these behaviours when later allowed to interact with the doll alone, children even improvised their own violent methods towards the doll. The rate of imitation was particularly high when the role model was of the same sex as the child. These findings support the theory of imitation of aggressive acts and suggests that children do learn and model violent behaviour following observation of aggressive behaviour committed by adult role models. In their second study, Bandura et al (1965) provided further support for SLT with the replication of the original Bobo doll experiment with the addition of reinforcement conditions. They found that when children had witnessed the adult role model being rewarded for their aggressive behaviour, imitation significantly increased, whereas the lowest levels of violence were seen when children observed the role model receiving a punishment for their actions.
When confidentiality is maintained, only qualified personnel have access to the results of the test, however this principle can also be void if the patient poses harm to him/herself or others. This principle goes hand in hand with knowledge of results principle, which ensures that the patient has a right to a full disclosure of the testing results. (Hogan, 2007) In order to ensure valid results, psychologist must make sure that the person taking the test is competent. By ensuring this, norms, reliability, validity and construction are developed and the test is utilized in a responsible manner. Competency also allows for test takers to feel comfortable and capable, resulting in a better diagnosis and treatment.
Bandura’s Social Learning Theory suggests that acts of aggression are learnt through the observation of role models. His original “Bobo Doll” study showed that when exposed to aggressive behaviour small children copied this behaviour, not just by being physically aggressive but even copying the verbally aggressive behaviour. However this study focuses on children who are supposed to learn in this manner, this doesn’t demonstrate that this would also be true in older children or adults who already have a set moral compass that would interfere with copying aggressive behaviours. However Bandura’s later study showed that if children saw someone get punished for aggressive behaviour they were less likely to be aggressive themselves when they were allowed to play with the bobo doll but if they saw someone get rewarded for this aggressive behaviour then they were much more likely to act aggressively themselves, this shows that vicarious reinforcement is important to the learning of aggression through the social learning theory, as receiving direct positive reinforcement leads to people having high self efficacy making them very likely to repeat the aggressive behaviour that they were rewarded for. In terms of aggression this reward could come in many forms such as acceptance from a violent gang they want to be a part of or just attention from a parent or teacher.
A strength of questionnaires for studying parental attitudes is that they don’t have many ethical issues. This is because if the parent doesn’t want to fill out the questionnaire they don’t have to so informed consent would not be a problem. Also, even though the researcher could ask sensitive questions like the respondents own experiences of school, they do not have to answer. Yet, because questionnaires can be confidential and anonymous, parents may be more inclined to answer questions as it would not belittle them in any way or create judgement as the researcher is completely detached from the parent. However, the researcher would need to make it very clear to the parents that they do not have to answer questions and guarantee their anonymity.
Second, the participants were deceived. According to ethical code of researches, participants should be completely informed what would take place during the experiment in the inform consent form before the experiment, but the researchers did not properly address all the situations to the participants. The violence was completely not expectable by the participants. From the perspective of ethical issue, it was wrong to conduct this experiment, but from the perspective of research, it is right to conduct this experiment. Therefore, I would say that it is worthy to conduct this experiment because the outcomes of experiment are very useful for the discovery of human behaviors.
However, the theory has some weaknesses, as there are criticisms with the theory and its studies. In 1961, Bandura et al. conducted a study that was critical to Social Learning Theory since it clearly displayed humans observing and imitating behaviour. Bandura hoped to discover whether children would imitate violence demonstrated by adults and if they were more likely to imitate adults of their own sex. A group of 36 boys and 36 girls of ages three to six were split into three groups.