Bobo doll experiment

Bobo doll experiment, groundbreaking study on aggression led by psychologist Albert Bandura that demonstrated that children are able to learn through the observation of adult behaviour. The experiment was executed via a team of researchers who physically and verbally abused an inflatable doll in front of preschool-age children, which led the children to later mimic the behaviour of the adults by attacking the doll in the same fashion.

Bandura’s study on aggression—the experiment for which he is perhaps best known—was carried out in 1961 at Stanford University, where Bandura was a professor. For this study he used 3- and 5-foot (1- and 1.5-metre) inflatable plastic toys called Bobo dolls, which were painted to look like cartoon clowns and were bottom-weighted so that they would return to an upright position when knocked down. The subjects were preschoolers at Stanford’s nursery school and were divided into three groups: one group observed aggressive adult behaviour models; another group observed nonaggressive behaviour models; and the third group was not exposed to any behaviour models.

The three groups were then divided by gender into six subgroups in which half of the subgroups would observe a same-sex behaviour model and half would observe an opposite-sex behaviour model. In the first stage of the experiment, the children were individually seated at a table in one corner of an experimental room and presented with diverting activities that had previously been shown to be of high interest to the children (e.g., stickers, pictures, prints) in order to discourage active participation and encourage mere observation. The behaviour model was then taken to the opposite corner—which contained another table and chair, a mallet, a Tinkertoy set, and a 5-foot Bobo doll—and was told he or she could play with these materials. In the aggressive behaviour model groups, the model abused the Bobo doll both physically (e.g., kicked, punched, threw, and assaulted with various objects) and verbally (e.g., made aggressive statements such as “Sock him in the nose” and “Pow” or nonaggressive statements such as “He sure is a tough fella” and “He keeps coming back for more”). In the nonaggressive behaviour model groups, the model ignored the Bobo doll and instead quietly assembled the Tinkertoys. After 10 minutes had elapsed, the behaviour models in both groups left the room.

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Albert Bandura: The Bobo doll experiment

In the second phase of the experiment, the children were taken individually into a different experimental room, where they were presented with a new group of appealing toys (e.g., train, fire engine, cable car, jet airplane, spinning top, doll with wardrobe, baby crib, and doll carriage). To test the hypothesis that the observation of aggression in others would increase the likelihood of aggression in the observer, the children were subjected to aggression arousal in the form of being told after two minutes that they could no longer play with the toys. The children were then told that they could, however, play with the toys in another room, where they were presented with various toys that were considered both aggressive (e.g., 3-foot Bobo doll, mallet, and dart guns) and nonaggressive (e.g., crayons, paper, farm animals, tea set, ball, and dolls).

In the final stage of the experiment, the children’s behaviour was observed over the course of 20 minutes and rated according to the degree of physically and verbally aggressive behaviour they modeled, the results of which yielded significantly higher scores for children in the aggressive behaviour model groups compared with those in both the nonaggressive behaviour model and control groups. Subsequent experiments in which children were exposed to such violence on videotape yielded similar results, with nearly 90 percent of the children in the aggressive behaviour groups later modeling the adults’ behaviour by attacking the doll in the same fashion and 40 percent of the those children exhibiting the same behaviour after eight months.

Although the study yielded similar results for both genders, it nonetheless suggested at least some difference depending on the degree to which a behaviour is sex-typed—that is, viewed as more common of or appropriate for a specific gender. For example, the data suggest that males are somewhat more prone to imitate physical aggression—a highly masculine-typed behaviour—than are females, with male subjects reproducing more physical aggression than female subjects; there were, however, no differences in the imitation of verbal aggression, which is less sex-typed. Additionally, both male and female subjects were more imitative of the male behaviour models than of the female models in terms of physical aggression but were more imitative of the same-sex models in terms of verbal aggression.