Bandura's Social Learning Theory
Another overview of learning theory and Bandura.
When it comes to learning theories, we cannot pass by without mentioning Albert Bandura. Let's focus on him and his personal life a bit. Bandura was an American-Canadian psychologist who lived between 1925 to 2021. He was very well-known for his contributions to the education field such as social cognitive theory, therapy, and personality psychology. Like Skinner and Pavlov, he contributed great new information about behaviorism. He has an experiment which is called the "Bobo Doll Experiment". In the other paragraph, l will explain this experiment.
The experiment aimed to see if social behaviors can be acquired by imitation or not. In this research, Bandura was a professor at Standford University and he made this experiment with 36 bıys and 36 girls who are between 3 to 6. This experiment aimed to show how aggressive these children can be under some specific conditions.
So how did he manage to examine the behavior of the children? 12 boys and 12 girls watched a male or female behave aggressively towards a Bobo doll. Another 24 children saw non-aggressive behavior towards the Bobo doll. The last 24 children weren't controlled at all. Then, each child went to the room alone and they got an attractive toy from the assistants. After the children started to play with the toy, the experimenters told the child that it was the best toy of the other child so they reserved for the others.
Then the other room contained both aggressive and non-aggressive toys. The children were observed in the room. Some of the children who saw the aggressiveness before took the aggressive toys and behaved badly toward the doll. As a result of the experiment, the experimenters saw that boys are more likely to behave aggressively physically but when it comes to verbal aggressiveness, they weren't that much different.
At the end of the experiment, it became clear that children can learn social behaviors from kindness to aggression through observing someone or some situations.
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