See Aggression… Do Aggression

Full transcript

Psychologist Albert Bandura wanted to answer a fascinating question: can children learn aggressive behavior simply by watching someone else act aggressively? To find out, Bandura and his team recruited 72 young children as participants and carefully designed an experiment to test observational learning in a controlled setting. Some children were placed in a room where they watched an adult model behave aggressively toward a large inflatable Bobo doll, hitting it and shouting at it repeatedly. Other children watched an adult who behaved calmly and peacefully, ignoring the Bobo doll entirely and playing quietly with other toys in the same room. Afterward, each child was allowed to play freely in a room with the Bobo doll present. Researchers observed and recorded exactly how each child chose to behave toward it. The results were clear: children who had watched the aggressive adult were far more likely to imitate that aggression. This proved that we can learn new behaviors just by watching others, a process Bandura called observational learning.