In this video I explain Albert Bandura’s famous “Bobo Doll” study on observational learning and aggressive behavior. In this study, adults modeled aggressive playing behaviors with a Bobo doll which were then performed by children who had simply observed the behaviors, revealing how observation can influence behavior. In later versions of the study, Bandura also demonstrated that the children’s behavior was influence by observation of the adult being rewarded or punished, which he referred to as vicarious reinforcement. Since the learning that occurs during observation isn’t directly observable at the time, this implies that it involves internal cognitive processes.
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Footage from the study with Bandura narrating:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr0OTCVtHbU
Video Transcript:
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review.
I’d like you to imagine a situation. I want you to imagine that we walk into a room and there’s two buttons on the wall. Now I walk up to the first button and when I press the button, I receive a painful electric shock and jump back. Then I go up to the second button and when I press that button, a slot opens and cash pours out into my hands. Now the question is, if you’re given the opportunity, which of these two buttons would you prefer to press?
This is a pretty obvious question. Of course I would choose the second button. But if we think about the principles of conditioning that we’ve learned so far, it’s not clear why that is. After all you haven’t been reinforced or punished, in fact you haven’t an even performed a behavior yet so how could the probability of some behavior of yours have changed just by observing my behavior?
This brings us to the idea of observational learning; that we can learn, we can change our behavior simply based on seeing what happens to other people.
This brings us to a famous study by Albert Bandura, often called the “Bobo doll” study. The reason it’s called the Bobo doll study is it involved a toy called a Bobo doll. So a Bobo doll, you’ve probably seen something like this before, it’s a toy that has a weight on the bottom then it’s like a sort of balloon filled with air in the shape of this clown here and when you punch the Bobo doll it tips over to the side and then because of the weight at the bottom, it comes back to being upright. So you push it over and it comes back.
In this Bobo doll study what Bandura did was he had children observe adults playing with toys including this Bobo doll. There were two versions, some of the children saw an aggressive version and in aggressive version of the play the adults punched the Bobo doll, they kicked it, they hit it another toy, they held it down on the ground and pummeled it with their fists. They were very aggressive.
Then other children saw a non-aggressive version of play. The adults were in the room with the Bobo doll but instead they sat quietly in the corner and played with Tinker Toys. After the children did this observation, they were given some time to play in the room with the toys. The question is, “how did they play when given the opportunity?”. Did the version of play that they saw influence their subsequent play, did it change their behavior?
It turns out that it did. The children who had watched the aggressive adult were more likely to engage in aggressive behavior themselves. They were more likely to punch the Bobo doll, to hit it with other objects, to hold it down on the floor and pummel it. In fact they even repeated words that they had heard the adult say while playing with the Bobo doll.
The children who hadn’t seen that aggressive version, the ones who saw the playing with Tinker Toys, the non-aggressive version, were much less likely to engage in these aggressive behaviors. This indicates the children had learned simply by watching the adults perform the behaviors. Bandura called this modeling.
So this is the process where our behavior is influenced by other behaviors that we observe. The adults are a model and the children follow that modell when given the chance to play with the same toys. Bandura did some subsequent versions of the study where he provided reinforcement or punishment to the adults. In one case, the adult would be reinforced and this was done by giving the adult candy after behaving aggressively.
The adult is punching and beating the Bobo doll and then is given candy. “Great job! You’re great at playing with that toy, have some candy!” In another version, the adults who hit the Bobo doll were subsequently punished; another person came and scolded them.
They said “why are you doing that? Stop that! Don’t do that!” So they were scolded for punching the Bobo doll. As you might expect, when children observed the adult being reinforced for the aggressive behavior there were more likely to copy the aggressive behavior but if the children watched the adult get punished for the aggressive behavior then the children were less likely to copy this behavior.
Bandura referred to this as vicarious reinforcement. This is the idea that we can be reinforced simply by observing somebody else receiving reinforcement or punishment. This explains how we’re able to learn from others and shows that we don’t have to directly engage in behaviors in order to learn from them. We don’t have to go through trial-and-error and make every mistake, we can just watch somebody else make a mistake or watch somebody else do something correctly and get reinforced and that influences our own behavior.
So you don’t need to press the button yourself and get the electric shock to know that it’s a bad idea to press that button. Similarly, you don’t need to press the button yourself to see that it gets a positive reinforcement. That money starts flowing out of this machine. You’ve learned something about that button without having to experience it yourself.
This idea of vicarious reinforcement means that there must be some cognitive elements going on when we observe other people being reinforced or punished. There’s something happening internally. There’s no change in our observable behavior the children just sat there watching the adult playing and it wasn’t until later they were given an opportunity to demonstrate that learning; that we could actually show that it influenced their behavior.
That’s an interesting idea that we’re going to come back to in the next video. This is the idea that there’s internal cognitive processes occurring during learning that are not immediately observable until we have a situation that allows those behaviors to be demonstrated. So we’ll look at two studies on that in the next video on latent learning. I’ll put a link in the video description box where you can see some footage from this original Bobo doll study by Albert Bandura.
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Thanks for watching!
