Year 12 Psychology: Learning Approach (AJW)



Key study: The Bo-Bo doll

(Bandura, Ross and Ross, 1961)

Aims

To see whether children will imitate behaviour that they have observed, not at the time that they see it but later in a similar context.

Hypotheses:

Participants exposed to an aggressive model will .....................................................................

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Participants exposed to a non-aggressive model will.................................................................

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Control participants who are not exposed to a model will... .....................................................

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Participants who have observed same sex model will .............................................................

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Boys will .....................................................................................................................................

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Procedure:

Research method: Experiment with independent measures

IV1: whether they see an aggressive or non-aggressive model or no model

IV2: whether they see a same sex or opposite sex model

IV3: whether the pps are male or female

DV1: number of physical aggressive acts displayed

DV2: Number of verbal aggressive acts displayed

Participants: 36 boys and 36 girls aged 37-69 months enrolled at Stanford University Nursery School

Task: The children were rated to see how aggressive they were in various different situations. This was done to ensure that there were similar levels of aggression amongst the control group and the experimental group. Cut out and divide your children between the two groups.

Why was this done and why is this a strength of the design?

See diagram on p351. Split your 48 experimental Pps into a pile of girls and a pile of boys and randomly allocate them into either the aggressive or non-aggressive conditions. You’ll have 24 in each group made up of 12 females and 12 males in each.

Final stage, in each of your four groups of 12, randomly allocate them either to see a male model or a female model. Now you should have your 8 piles, which equate to the 8 experimenal conditions. Now make a note of why the random allocation was performed and why this was a strength of the study?

Now, create 5 laboratories, (pieces of coloured paper, with identical tables of toys glued in one corner!).

One lab has no model, move this to the side.

Now, place your models in one corner of each of the remaining 4 labs; female models in two labs and male nodels in the other two labs. Place identical sets of toys, mallets and BoBo dolls in each lab. Don’t glue them down yet!

In one lab the female model will play aggressively with BoBo after about 1 minute and in the other lab she will play in a non-aggressive way and not touch the mallet. Same with the males. Aggressive play was standardised to a set of moves including; sit on BoBo and punch him and hit him on the head with a mallet. Specific language was used such as ‘Sockeroo!’, and ‘sock him in the nose’. In the non-aggressive condition, specific non-aggressive words were used during play. Make up some of your own.

Now create a new testing lab with same attractive toys that the children should really want to play with. Take one of your children there to play, leave him alone but then come back and tell him or her “you are not allowed to play with these toys, they are special and not to be played with today”. Show your child’s reaction! Make a note of why this was done and why this was an important strength of the design.

Now create a final type of lab this time containing a similar but non-identical BoBo doll, a mallet, set of toys inlcuding some which are typcially played with in an aggressive way, e.g. toy gun and face hanging from celing which can be hit, and some toys typcially played with in a non-aggressive way.

Create a one way mirror in your lab and place two experimenters behind the mirror. One of the experimenters does not know the children or which condition they are in (double blind). Make a ote of what they were recording.

Why was important that the observers didn’t know which conditions the children were in? Why is this a strength of the study? Why were there two observers? What was the purpose of this and why was this a strength of the study.

Results

Comparing the aggressive and non-aggressive conditions

| |Agg |Non agg |Control |

|Physical |50.9 |4.2 |3.2 |

|Verbal |32.7 |1.4 |2.4 |

|Mallet |80.2 |26.4 |26.6 |

|Non imitative |82.6 |57 |30.7 |

|Total |275.9 |126 |62.9 |

The children in the aggressive conditon showed more aggression than those in the non-aggressive condition by more than double the amount seen in the non-aggressive model conditions and more than four times the amount seen in the control condition.

Comparing the girls and the boys

| | |Agg |Non agg |Control |

|Physical |Girls |12.7 |2.5 |1.2 |

| |Boys |38.2 |1.7 |2.0 |

|Verbal |Girls |15.7 |0.3 |0.7 |

| |Boys |17 |1.1 |1.7 |

|Total |Girls |28.4 |2.8 |1.9 |

| |Boys |55.2 |2.9 |3.7 |

The boys showed more nearly twice as much imitative aggression than the girls. However, the girls showed similar levels of physical and verbal aggression, while the boys had a tednecy to model physical aggression much more than verbal aggression. There were similar amounts of verbal aggression modelled by girls and boys.

Comparing the male and female models

The male model tended to imitated more than the female model by both girls and boys. However, the female model was more influential than the male model when considering the girl’s verbal aggression and non-imitative aggression. On almost every count the boys were influenced more by their same sex model (male) than girls were influenced by their same-sex model (female).

On every type of aggression the boys were either two or three times more likely to be influenced by the male model than the female model.

Conclusions

o Not all behaviour is learnt through direct reinforcement; behaviour that has been simply observed can also become more probable

o This may be more likely when the role model is an adult and the observer is a child

o Male models may be more influential than female models for childen but this may only have been because the modelled behaviour was typcilly associated with males (sex typing)

o Modelling may only happen when the observed behaviour is congruent with social norms, i.e. would boys imitate a man who behaved in a female way?

Evaluation

o If you have completed all the tasks on this sheet you should have already created a list of 4 strengths; go back to these and elaborate them to make sure you have enough material

o You should also now create your own list of weaknesses, think about…

o the research method: lab experiment (validity and reliabiltiy)

o the design independent measures (validity and reliabiltiy)

o the participants (American 3-6 year olds, from StanfordUniversity Nursery school) and the generalisability

o the ethics of the study (physcial and psychological harm)

o the credibility of the study

o the possible applications of the study

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