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Aggression, in its abundance of forms, is arguably the greatest social problem facing this country and the world today (Hock 2009). This has sparked curiosity in many researchers who may believe that aggression is learned, which began one of the most famous and influential experiments conducted in the history of psychology (Hock 2009), The Bobo Doll Experiment. The Bobo Doll Experiment was the name of two experiments conducted by Albert Bandura in 1961 and 1963 studying children´s behavior after watching a model punching a Bobo Doll and getting rewarded, punished or no consequences for it.

The experiment is the empirical demonstration of Bandura's social learning theory, which states that behavior is learned from the environment through the process of observational learning. Children observe the people around them behaving in various ways (McLeod 2011). Social Learning Theory involves a process of attention, imitation, reinforcement and also identification. It shows that people not only learn by being rewarded or punished itself (Behaviorism), they can learn from watching somebody being rewarded or punished, too (Observational learning). An example that made headlines in 2007, after the video showing the hanging of Saddam Hussein was widely distributed. In an article by Tom Zeller (2007) families around the world whose children had been exposed to the video attributed the tragic hanging deaths of their young boys to the video of Mr. Hussein.

The experiments conducted by Bandura, Ross, & Ross (1961), are important because they sparked many more studies on the effects of social learning theory, such as the effects of media violence and aggression in children. This topic has become exceptionally popular in recent years as more and more violence has been allowed on television and videos games that children are subject to viewing. " In 1972, the Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior concluded that television can, under some circumstances, for some children, lead to increased aggressiveness" (Heath, Kruttschnitt & Ward 1986).

Studies done by Heath, Kruttschnitt & Ward (1986), who built their study upon past research of the connection between viewing television and aggression. These researchers were also successful in, controlling for factors such as socioeconomic status, intelligence, race, and mother's education, which did not eliminate the relationship between media exposure and aggression but in some cases actually strengthened it( Heath, Kruttschnitt & Ward 1986. According to Johnson et al. (2002), three to five violent acts are depicted in an average hour of prime-time television and 20 to 25 violent acts are depicted in an average hour of children's television. Research has also indicated that viewing television violence is associated with aggressive behavior (Johnson et al.2002).

Method
The subjects for this experiment were 36 boys and 36 girls from the Stanford University nursery school. All children were between the ages of 37 months- 69 months. The children were organized into 8 groups and a control group. 24 children were exposed to an aggressive model and 24 children were exposed to a non-aggressive model. The two groups were then both broken down into males and females. The groups were broken down even further to ensure that half of the children were exposed to models of their own sex and the other half were exposed to models of the opposite sex. The remaining 24 children were part of a control group.

For the experiment, each child was exposed to the scenario individually, so as not to be influenced or distracted by classmates. The first part of the experiment involved bringing a child and the adult model into a playroom. In the playroom, the child was seated in one corner filled with highly appealing activities such as stickers and stamps.The adult model was seated in another corner containing a toy set, a mallet, and an inflatable Bobo doll. Before leaving the room, the experimenter explained to the child that the toys in the adult corner were only for the adult to play with.

During the aggressive model scenario, the adult would begin by playing with the toys for approximately one minute. After this time the adult begins to show aggression towards the Bobo doll. Examples of this include hitting the Bobo doll and using the toy mallet to hit the Bobo doll in the face. After a period of about 10 minutes, the experimenter came back into the room, dismissed the adult model, and took the child into another playroom. The non-aggressive adult model simply played with the small toys for the entire 10 minute-period. In this situation, the Bobo doll was completely ignored by the model then the child was taken out of the room.

The next stage placed the child and experimenter into another room filled with interesting toys: a truck, dolls, and spinning top. There, the child was invited to play with the toys. After about 2 minutes the experimenter decides that the child is no longer allowed to play with the toys. This was done to build up frustration. The experimenter says that the child may play with the toys in the experimental room including both aggressive and non-aggressive toys. In the experimental room the child was allowed to play for the duration of 20 minutes while the experimenter evaluated the child’s play.

The first measure recorded was based on physical aggression. This included punching or kicking the Bobo doll, sitting on the Bobo doll, hitting it with a mallet, and tossing it around the room. Verbal aggression was the second measure recorded. The judges counted each time the children imitated the aggressive adult model and recorded their results. The third measure was the amount of times the mallet was used to display other forms of aggression than hitting the doll. The final measure includes modes of aggression shown by the child that were not direct imitation of the role-model’s behavior.

Results
Bandura found that the children exposed to the aggressive model were more likely to act in physically aggressive ways than those who were not exposed to the aggressive model. For those children exposed to the aggressive model, the number of imitative physical aggressions exhibited by the boys was 38.2 and 12.7 for the girls (Hock 2009). The results concerning gender differences strongly supported Bandura's prediction that children are more influenced by same-sex models. Boys exhibited more aggression when exposed to aggressive male models than boys exposed to aggressive female models. When exposed to aggressive male models, the number of aggressive instances exhibited by boys averaged 104 compared to 48.4 aggressive instances exhibited by boys exposed to aggressive female models.

While the results for the girls show similar findings, the results were less drastic. When exposed to aggressive female models, the number of aggressive instances exhibited by girls averaged 57.7 compared to 36.3 aggressive instances exhibited by girls exposed to aggressive male models.

Bandura also found that the children exposed to the aggressive model were more likely to act in verbally aggressive ways than those who were not exposed to the aggressive model. The number of imitative verbal aggressions exhibited by the boys was 17 times and 15.7 times by the girls(Hock 2009). In addition, the results indicated that the boys and girls who observed the non-aggressive model exhibited far less non-imitative mallet aggression than in the control group, which had no model.

The experimenters came to the conclusion that children observing adult behavior are influenced to think that this type of behavior is acceptable thus weakening the child’s aggressive inhibitions. The result of reduced aggressive inhibitions in children means that they are more likely to respond to future situations in a more aggressive manner.

Lastly, the evidence strongly supports that males have a tendency to be more aggressive than females. When all instances of aggression are tallied, males exhibited 270 aggressive instances compared to 128 aggressive instances exhibited by females (Hock 2009).

Critique
Scholars such as Ferguson (2010) suggest the Bobo Doll studies are not studies of aggression at all, but rather that the children were motivated to imitate the adult in the belief the videos were instructions. In other words children were motivated by the desire to please adults rather than genuine aggression. Furthermore Ferguson has criticized the external validity of the study noting that bo-bo dolls are designed to be hit.

The experiment was also biased in several areas which weakened the internal validity

1.	Selection bias
 * Bandura’s subjects were all from the nursery of Stanford University. During the 1960s, the opportunity of studying in a university, especially one as prestigious as Stanford was a privilege that only the upper-middle class whites had. Besides, the racial bias and economic status of the whites and blacks were still very vast at that time. Generally only the upper-middle class and rich whites were able to afford putting their children in a nursery. Thus, the subjects would turn out to be mostly white and of similar backgrounds.

2.	Unclear history of subjects
 * The ethnicities of the subjects were never documented but Bandura and his colleagues made sweeping statements on their findings when explaining the aggression and violence trait among subgroups and lower socioeconomic communities.

3.	Ambiguous temporal sequence
 * As the data of the “real life aggression and control group conditions came from their 1961 study”, parallel ongoing events including the mental maturation of the subjects could have been confused with the observations and results of the 1963 study.

Bar-on, Broughton, Buttross, Corrigan, et al. (2001) explained that the underdeveloped frontal lobe of children below the age of 8 causes them to be unable to separate reality from fantasy. As an example, children up to the age of 12 believe that there are monsters in their closet or under the bed. They are also sometimes unable to distinguish dreams from reality.

Furthermore, biological theorists argue that the social learning theory completely ignores individual’s biological state by ignoring the uniqueness of an individual’s DNA, brain development, and learning differences.

According to Worthman and Loftus (1992), Bandura’s study was unethical and morally wrong as the subjects were manipulated to respond in an aggressive manner. They also find it to be no surprise that long-term implications are apparent due to the methods imposed in this experiment as the subjects were taunted and were not allowed to play with the toys and thus incited agitation and dissatisfaction. Hence, they were trained to be aggressive.

Although there have been other research which examine the effects of violent movies and video games such as Plagens et al.’s 1991 study on violent movies, “Feshbach and R.D. Singer believed that television actually decreases the amount of aggression in children” (Islom, 1998) – Catharsis effect. A study was made on juvenile boys for six weeks. Half were made to view violent movies throughout the period of six weeks while another half viewed non-violent movies for six weeks. The boy’s behavior was then observed and the result was boys who viewed violent movies were less aggressive than those who viewed non-violent movies. The conclusion drawn by Feshback and Singer was that those who viewed violent movies were less aggressive as they were able to transmit all their feelings and thoughts of aggression into the movie.

Differences between learning and performing
Albert Bandura tested in the Bobo doll experiment in 1963 if there are differences in learning or just in performing when children see a model being rewarded/punished or experienced no consequences for aggressive behavior.

The procedure of the experiment was very similar to the one in 1961. Children between the age of 2,5 and 6 years watched a film - a mediated model punched and screamed aggressively at a Bobo doll. Depending on the experimental group the film ended with a scene in which the model was rewarded with candies or punished with the warning “Don´t do it again”. In the neutral condition the film ended right after the punching scene.Then the children stayed in a room with many toys and a Bobo doll. The experimenter found that the children showed less often similar behavior to the model when they were shown the clip that ended with the punching scene as compared to the other conditions. Boys showed more imitative aggression than girls. That is the measure of the performance and it supports the results of the experiments in 1961.

After that, the experimenter asked the children to show what they have seen in the film. (In an earlier experiment with the same procedure the children were asked to describe the behavior. But imitation seems to be a better index for learning.) He did not find differences in the children´s demonstrating behavior depending on the movie. The experiment shows that rewards or punishment don´t influence learning or remembering information, they just influence if the behavior is performed or not. The differences between girls‘ and boys‘ imitating behavior got smaller. That is a sign of the fact that girls inhibit the punished behavior more than boys do.

Are children influenced by film-mediated aggressive models?
For many years media violence has been a hot topic concerning the influence over children and their aggressive behavior. In one study, in 1963, Albert Bandura, using children between the ages 3 and 6, tested the extent to which film-mediated aggressive models influenced imitative behavior.

48 girls and 48 boys were divided into 3 experimental groups and 1 control group. Group 1, watched a live model become aggressive towards the Bobo doll. Group 2, watched a film version of the human model become aggressive to the Bobo doll and group 3 watched a cartoon version of a cat become aggressive towards the Bobo doll. Each child watched the aggressive acts individually. Following the exposure to the models all fours groups of children were then individually placed in a room with an experimenter where they were exposed to mildly frustrating situation to elicit aggression. Next the children were allowed to play freely in an adjoining room, which was full of toys, including the Bobo doll and the “weapons” that were used by the models. The researchers observed the children and noted any interaction with the Bobo doll.

Results showed that the children who had been exposed to the aggressive behavior, whether real-life, on film or cartoon, exhibited nearly twice as much aggressive behavior than the control group. It was also found that boys exhibited more total aggression than girls. The results of this experiment shed light on how influential media can be on children and their behavior.

Variations of the 'Bobo doll' experiment
Due to numerous criticisms, Bandura replaced the ‘Bobo doll’ with a live clown. The young woman beat up a live clown in the video shown to preschool children and in turn when the children were led into another room where they found a live clown, they imitated the action in the video they had just watched.

Variation 1:
 * In Friedrich and Stein (1972)’s ‘The Mister Rogers’ study:


 * Procedures: A group of preschoolers watched Mister Rogers every weekday for four consecutive weeks.


 * Result: Children from lower socioeconomic communities were easier to handle and more open about their feelings.

Variation 2:
 * Loye, Gorney & Steele (1977) conducted variation of the ‘Bobo Doll’ Experiment using 183 married males aged between 20 to 70 years old.


 * Procedure: The participants were to watch one of five TV programs for 20 hours over a period of one week while their wives secretly observed and recorded their behavior; helpful vs. hurtful behaviors when not watching the program.


 * Result: Participants of violent programs showed significant increase in aggressive moods and “hurtful behavior” while participants who viewed pro-social programs were more passive and demonstrated a significant increase of “emotional arousal”.

Variation 3:
 * Black and Bevan’s research (1992) had movie-goers fill out an aggression questionnaire either before they entered the cinema and after the film; a violent film and a romantic film.


 * Procedure: Subjects were randomly selected as they went to view violent and romantic film. They were asked to fill out pretest and posttest questionnaires on their emotional state.


 * Result: Those who watched violent films were already aggressive before viewing the film but it was aggravated after the viewing while there was no change in those who viewed romantic films.

Variation 4:
 * Anderson & Dill (2000) randomly assigned college students to play two games; Wolfenstein, a science fiction first-person shooter game and Tetris. Results of this study were inconsistent, and this study has sometimes been criticized for using poorly validated aggression measures, and exaggerating the consistency of its findings (Ferguson, 2009).

Variation 5:

Bartholow and Anderson (2009), examined how playing violent video games affect levels of aggression in a laboratory.

Procedure: A total of 22 men and 21 women were randomly assigned to play either a violent or non-violent video game for ten minutes. Then competed in a reaction time task. Punishment level set by opponents measured aggression.

Results: The results supported the researchers hypothesis that playing the violent video game would result in more aggression than the non-violent game. In addition, results also pointed to a potential difference in aggressive style between men and women.

Discussion
From this experiment, Bandura established that there are 4 processes that are apparent in the modeling process

1.	Attention
 * One has to be paying attention and not distracted to be able to absorb knowledge. Physical factors such as being tired, having a hangover, being sick, nervous, extremely excited or distracted by a competing stimuli would mar one’s focus on a subject. For example, when a student is in love, he or she would only be thinking of his/her loved one. All else is a blur; hear but not listening, see but not looking, eat but not tasting, breathing but not smelling and so on.

2.	Retention
 * The proof that one has been paying attention is when one is able to remember the intended stimuli. Imagery and language play a great part here. Memory is stored in “the form of mental images or verbal descriptions.” Once it is stored, the memory can be recalled later and be replicated in one’s actions and behavior.

3.	Reproduction
 * This stage of modeling another requires one to have the ability to duplicate the action or/and behavior. A wheelchair bound person would not be able to duplicate a person doing cartwheels but one who is able to use all their limbs might be able to improve their cartwheel techniques after watching the video of a gymnast doing cartwheels. Similarly, after acquiring the ability to draw, one can improve their skills by watching an expert drawing or by emulating the instructions in a drawing book.
 * However, this does not mean that day-dreaming is useless. It in fact plays a part in refining our skills. “Our abilities improve even when we just imagine ourselves performing! Many athletes, for example, imagine their performance in their mind’s eye prior to actually performing”,

4.	Motivation


 * a.	Nonetheless, the most important part of the modeling process is motivation! If one is not motivated to emulate an action or behavior, attention would not be there to start with. According to Bandura, there are two categories of motives -positive [Past reinforcements, Promised reinforcements and Vicarious reinforcements] and negative [Past punishment, Promised punishment and vicarious punishment] both of which are based on traditional behaviorism such as BF Skinner’s Operant Conditioning and Pavlov’s Classical Conditioning. A good example of this is portrayed in an article by Horner, Bhattacharyya & O'connor (2008), after describing a scenario in a classroom, the children were exposed to different types of reinforcement without really knowing it. "When Jasmine had to leave the sand table for pouring sand on the floor, show was enactively punished. Tyler, Mackensie, and Juan were vicariously punished by observing Jasmine, since they did not pour sand on the floor (Horner, Bhattavharyya & O'Connor 2008).


 * However, there are as many experiments conducted which support as well as nullify Bandura’s hypothesis. So far, all the variations of Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment have only focused on a maximum of three important factors; a combination of background, personal temperament, environment, interpersonal and intrapersonal relationships. Yet, a pretest of phobias and daily mood assessment were not assessed before the experiment. Thus, we can safely say that until an experiment takes all the factors into consideration and conducts a longitudinal assessment, Bandura’s hypothesis is still on the fence.

==See also=
 * Developmental Psychology
 * Imitation
 * Observational Learning
 * Role model