The Bobo Doll Experiment

This is a video of Albert Bandura's Bobo Doll Experiment, which studied patterns of behavior associated with aggression. In this experiment, a clip is shown to three groups of children in a kindergarten class of a woman student beating up this doll. What was different, is that one group was shown just the video of the woman beating the doll, one was shown the woman being praised and rewarded for hitting the doll and the last group was shown then woman being punished for beating the doll. After the video was shown, the children were put into a play room with a selection of different toys.




After Bandera observed the children, he had seen the group 1 and 2 were very aggressive with the doll, but group 3 was less aggressive. He concluded that the children that were exposed to the aggressive model were more likely to be aggressive toward the doll. Those that were not were less likely. For the children that were exposed to the aggressive model, the number of imitative physical aggressions exhibited by the boys was 38.2 and 12.7 for the girls.

The experimenters also came to the conclusion that children observing adult behavior are influenced to think that this type of behavior is acceptable, making the child's aggressive inhibitions weak.

“Albert Bandura Bobo Doll Experiment.” Psychology Videos: Experimental Cognitive Clinical Physiological Psychology Psychotherapy Videos and Clips. N.p., 2011. Web. 16 Apr. 2012. <http://www.psychotube.net/‌learning-psychology/‌albert-bandura-bobo-doll-experiment/>.