Psychology: Observational Learning

Psychologist must provide physical and mental protection. Vulnerable people must have the right to received special care and ensure welfare for them. They should not take the participants in situations of extreme risk. They should ask help from therapists and make sure that the participant is total-Bobo doll

Cruelty is a word that can be defined many ways; however, I believe it means the “intentional and malicious infliction of physical suffering upon living creatures.” Stanley Milgram, a Professor of Psychology at Yale University, created an experiment in order to measure the willingness of a subject to obey orders from an Authority figure who instructed the subject to fulfill acts that would harm another individual. In Milgram’s Research article “The Perils of Obedience” and Lauren Slater’s Book Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the twentieth century; they both also explore the topic of whether or not humans are innately cruel. Although some people may argue that people inherently cruel because of what transpired in the Catherine Genovese case, the results of the Stanley Milgram obedience experiment, and both the seizure and smoke experiment by Darley and Latane, these cases do not show that they were cruel because the subjects were influenced by diffusion of responsibility, authority and social cues.

Classical conditioning is defined as the learning process in which two stimuli become associated with each other (Licht, Hull, & Ballantyne 2016). Personally, I can relate to this type of conditioning. There was a time when my family and I went to a Chinese restaurant. I ordered the steamed chicken with broccoli and garlic sauce, which was one of my favorite dishes. That night, when I got home, I got food poisoning from the chicken and broccoli. Now, I cannot bear to smell my favorite Chinese food anymore because it makes me sick to my stomach. The unconditioned stimulus would be the food poisoning after I ate the bad Chinese food because I could not help that I got sick. The unconditioned response was feeling sick and nauseated. The conditioned

I was in the gero unit at Millwood. I got to see an older people suffering from different types of psych disorder. It was around breakfast time, I saw an old lady crying and laughing at the same time. She was yelling to the nurse saying she need her medication and she is in pain. She seems disoriented. she was telling nurse that she wants to get out from that place. She had one bible in her hand and she was telling nurse she will save herself from dying and Jesus will take care of her. She seems very spiritual person. I feel like she is very interesting person to talk with so I choose her for my patient interview. She is suffering from bipolar disorder and her mood swings every minute. I was interviewing her and she suddenly started talking in loud voice and started crying. I was very frightened by the situation. I took a deep breath and I calmed myself down. I asked her if she need any help from my side. She was suffering from gas in stomach and it is causing her pain so she told me to get her morning medicine. It was her medication time, so I administered her medication in the supervision of my nurse. After an hour of medication ingestion, she seems cooperative to talk and she was calmed. I

From a biological perspective, elements that are able to influence aggression includes, genetic influences, neural influences and biochemical influences.

Bandura conducted a study which was named Bobo the Doll study. He analysed violence on the TV and if it impacted the children who were watching it. There were 72 individuals who were involved in which there was 36 girls and 36 boys. He had divided the children into groups to fill up three environments which he had set up which were they following; 24 aggressive role model, 24 non-aggressive role model and 24 control group with no model. In each group they had 12 individuals, 6 boys and 6 girls. In these conditions children were individually directed to a room containing toys and this was during the point when 24 children watched a male or female model behaving aggressively towards a doll. The adult physically attacked the doll in an aggressive

Bandura developed the social learning theory by conducting an experiment with children and a bobo doll. A control group saw a video of how to nicely play with the bobo doll. The experimental group was shown a video of how to throw and hurt the bobo doll. It became clear that humans imitate what they see others do because that is how they perceive they are suppose to act. Bandura argued that the experiments demonstrated a link between violent media programs and aggressive behavior. Bandura came up with a four step process: attention, retention, motor reproduction, and motivation (Campbell 490). The social learning theory applies to my study of how video games affected my dorm mates and their behavior, just like

Albert Bandura conducted the BoBo doll experiment to investigate social behaviors can be developed by observation. The experiment was based on the behaviors of the children after watching how the adults acts with the Bobo doll. The adults were very violently with the doll and the kids were more aggressive with the doll. The aggression of the children came from observing the actions of the adult’s behavior with the Bobo doll.

The term learning is defined by the Oxford dictionary as the process of acquiring knowledge from reading and studying. This is a very formal view on how we humans learn on a daily basis. However, Bandura’s Social Cognitive Learning Model proposes that learning may occur just by mere observation of one’s surrounding. This process of learning may be also referred to as informal learning. This way of learning has been in practice since the beginning of our civilisation as a method to pass on the wisdom of the elders to the younger generations in order to perform day to day tasks. Bandura on the other hand calls this form of learning as Observational Learning.

Social Learning Theory is different from the Behaviourist Theory as it recognises the significance of cognition, as we are not submissive learners. Cognition includes mental processes used to help us make choices in what we do. We learn through: observation, modelling and indirect and direct reinforcement. Bandura believed that vicarious positive reinforcement is the most common reason for behavior modelling. A strength is that it is less deterministic than the behaviorist approach and can account for cultural differences in behaviour. A weakness is that it underestimates the influence of biological factors.

To prove observational learning was correct, Bandura conducted an experiment called the “Bobo Doll” experiment (Bandura, 1961). In the Bobo Doll experiment, Bandura collected 36 boys and 36 girls from the Stanford University Nursery School aged between 3 to 6 years old. In the experiment there were three groups of 24 children, 12 boys and 12 girls. One group was exposed to an aggressive clip of adults beating a Bobo doll. Another group was shown a non-violent clip of a person playing with a tinker toy set and ignoring the Bobo doll. The final group was used as the control group and was not exposed to any clip. During the 1960’s, films and videos were just starting to grow in popularity due to the television; therefore, the television acted as the environmental factor in which observational learning took place. After the showing of the clips, each child was taken separately to a room with attractive toys and a room with both attractive and aggressive toys, spending 20 minutes in each room. The children were observed every five seconds, so there were 240 response units for each child. Upon collecting the data, Bandura clearly saw that children who saw the aggressive clip had far more aggressive

Social cognitive theory, also known as social learning theory, “a theory of learning that focuses on changes in behaviour that result from observing others” (Bandura 2001 as cited in Eggen,Kauchak, 2013). According to Simons(1994, p.43) Social learning Theory is the view of psychologists who emphasize that behaviour is learned through experiences with the environment and that cognitive factors influence learning. Albert Bandura is the theorist behind this psychological theory. According to a survey conducted in 2002, Bandura was ranked as the third most frequently cited psychologist of all time (Eggen,Kauchak, 2010). Social Cognitive Theory emphasizes the roles of beliefs, self-perceptions, and learner expectations (Eggen,Kauchak.2010).

PSYC_6222_wk6_disc1Discussion 1 - Week 6 Vicarious Learning Vicarious learning is originally coined by Albert Bandura as he believed that direct reinforcement could not account for all types of learning (Friedman & Shustack, 2012). Vicarious learning is modeling and observation learning; it is a type of learning that comes from observing others’ behavior and adding that information to the possible repertoire of one’s own behavior (Friedman & Shustack, 2012). According to Bandura, vicarious learning can occur when the observer pays attention to an action and remembers the behavior that the observer can replicate the observed behavior (Friedman & Shustack, 2012). In the condition of observational learning, if a model

Learning refers to any relatively permanent change or modification in behavior resulting from practice and or exposure conditioning. It could be motor, visual, or conceptual. Learning theories provide a theoretical outline that describes how information is absorbed, processed and retained during learning (Schunk, 2015). In this paper, I will discuss the learning theories of behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism, and humanism and some principles within these theories that apply to learning like classical and operant conditioning, scaffolding, schemas, situated cognition, Bloom’s taxonomy, as well metacognitive activities. With research findings, we can learn what it takes to use different parts of our brain for different learning theories.

Social learning refers to learning through interacting with other people. It also shows that not all learning is formal (university etc) but also happens informally in everyday life (Grieve, et al. 2005). Many parents and teachers use operant social learning to encourage good behavior in children. We learn socially acceptable or desirable behavior through being rewarded and getting punished for bad behavior (Grieve, et al. 2005). Another way that social learning occurs is through observation, which is, imitating or watching the behaviors of other and observing the consequences of it. There are four components of observational learning which are attention, retention or memory, initiation or reproduction and motivation (Grieve, et al.