What do you think? Can we only learn through direct experience, or also from studying others?
Psychologist Albert Bandura came up with an interesting experiment
to answer that exact question and form a theory.
Bandura came up with the social learning theory in the 1960s,
a time dominated by scholars who didn’t believe Bandura's idea
and argued that learning was always the result of classical and operational conditioning.
To prove that children can learn by mere observation,
Bandura came up with the Bobo Doll Experiments - a set of controversial studies,
which involved preschool children, adult models and a stand-up punch doll.
In the first set of experiments, the children were seated alone in a corner of the room. From there
they observed an adult actor aggressively kicking and scolding the Bobo doll for about 10 minutes.
Afterwards, the same child was put into a new playroom where another
adult deliberately frustrated the child by taking away the toys the child played with.
The frustrated child was then put back into the room with the Bobo doll where Bandura and his
team made the following 3 observations: 1. Children who initially saw the adult
punching the doll, often copied the behavior. 2. Boys were three times more likely to do so.
3. Boys reproduced the behavior twice as often, if they observed a man do it compared to boys
who observed a female actor. Girls were also more influenced by same-sex models.
To find out if movies would have the same effect,
Bandura let some children watch the model live, and others watch it on video,
or as a cartoon animation. As all three groups showed similar responses,
Bandura concluded that children imitate others regardless of where they have seen the behavior.
In the last variation of the experiments, Bandura wanted to know if the children would
act differently when the models were reinforced or punished for their behavior towards the doll.
Now, the children first saw the actor hit the doll,
and then observed another adult enter the room. This second adult would then react to the actor.
These last results showed that it did not make much of a difference to the children whether the
aggressor was praised or not. However, the kids who saw that the model was punished, displayed
much less aggression later, an effect which was especially true for girls. In other words,
seeing others being rewarded does not necessarily motivate us to copy their behavior.
Seeing others being punished, on the other hand, can significantly diminish our will to copy it.
The fact that Bandura was able to prove that children also learn by observing others,
was a breakthrough in psychology. As a consequence of his findings,
scholars and government officials argued that we should ban violence in films and
games. Others suggested that the Bobo Doll studies are not studies of aggression,but
rather show that the children are simply motivated by the desire to please adults or act like them.
Bandura and his co-author Richard Walters later defined
five key tenets of the Social Learning Theory:
1. Learning is a cognitive process that takes place in a social setting.
2. Learning can occur by observing a behavior AND the consequences of such
3. Learning can happen without an observable change in behavior, because we may learn
without displaying what we have learned. 4. Reinforcements play a role but are
not entirely responsible for learning. 5. Cognition, behavior, and environment
all mutually influence each other — a process called reciprocal determinisms.
Bandura, who in college attended a psychology course only to kill time,
soon became passionate about the topic and then one of most cited psychologists in history.
About reality, he said: "Most of the images of reality on which we base our actions
are really based on vicarious experience."
What do you think? How much of your learning comes from observing others?
And if you learn socially, who are your greatest teachers?
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