Bandura

Bandura

1. Background

   • Previous studies have shown that children will imitate what someone else is doing when they remain in the same immediate setting. imitative learning is seeing whether they will still display the newly learned behaviour in a new setting when the model is no longer present.

2. AIMS

   • Observing an aggressive model will lead a subject to reproduce aggressive acts similar to their models, whereas this will not be true of participants who observed non-aggressive models or who observed no model.
   • Observing an aggressive model will lead a participant to behave in a generally more aggressive manner, whereas those who observed a non - aggressive model would be inhibited from behaving aggressively.
   • Participants will imitate the behaviour of a same - sex model to a greater degree than a model of the opposite sex.
   • Boys will be more likely than girls to imitate aggressive behaviour because it is a highly masculine activity.

3. Participants

   • American children from a university nursery school
     • Stanford in California, the university where this study was conducted
   • 72 children
     • 36 boys
     • 36 girls
     • Aged between 37 and 69 months (approx. 3 to 5 years)
       • Mean age of 52 months
   • Two adults - male and female
     • served as model
   • One female experimenter conducted the study for al 72 children

4. Procedure

   • 3 conditions in order to assess the effect of the models behaviour
     • group 1
       • Observed an aggressive model
     • group 2
       • observed a non-aggressive model
     • Group 3
       • control group
         • were not exposed to any model
     • The effects of gender were assessed (the interaction between the models gender and the childs gender)
       • In order to do this each of the experimental groups was subdivided into 4 groups
         • boys watching same sex model
         • boys watching opposite sex model
         • girls watching same sex model
         • girls watching opposite sex model