How Do You Describe And Evaluate Bandura's Social Learning Theory

To begin with, the social learning theory by Albert Bandura (1977) states that humans learn behavior through observing the environment. Meaning that either on purpose or not, a model might be a teacher of behavior by being observed and imitated. But as already said, these models might have an involuntary effect – Bandura states that all what it is needed is for a human to become “student” is to have an interest in certain behavior, be able to reproduce it because if not, there is no motivation to either retain it or want to show off. Children are more likely to fall into imitation because they are learning, forming their intellect and personality and so they focus in their surroundings. The interest to replicate certain behavior can have several reasons but in general it is more likely that children will imitate the people who perceive similar to itself (i.e. same age or sex).

Bandura’s theory stamped from the findings in the famous Bobo doll key study by Bandura el al. (1961): where they wanted to find how much watching other

But it does not answer the research question since the experiment results cannot definitely predict if the child will have the same reaction for repeatedly exposure the aggressive parents or violence on television. This is because the model was a human stranger, someone that had no personal relation with the children and concerning my research question; it was not a media character. So we don’t know whether the children would imitate a non-real model, human model in real life, such as videogames or television characters. I decided to look for a research that could give me the same results as Bandura et al. (1961) but involving media. Meaning that the role model in this case would not be in a real life circumstance. And where aggressive behavior could be admire while or shortly after the task or