Social Learning Theories

In the university of Harvard in 1961, legendary psychologist Albert Bandura conducted an experiment in which children watched as a woman interacted violently with an inflatable clown. After 10 minutes of watching this, the kids was put into an exciting room filled with toys that were soon taken away. This frustrating the kids and then the frustrated children was left alone with the inflatable clown. The study showed that the children who watched the clown get beat up by the women were much more likely to mimic her aggression, attempting to maul and punch the clown while kids who observed the woman play friendly with the clown either mimicked her kindness or completely ignored the clown. The kids in the experiment started abusing bobo with physical

Bandura’s social learning theory states that people’s behaviour is learned from the environment through the process of observational learning. It is believed children observe the people around them behaving in various ways and process that behaviour as the acceptable way of behaving even though it may be classified as socially

Richard Ramirez is without a doubt an individual who plays a role in the social learning theory. Although Ramirez acted alone in his crimes, there is no denying that his cousin’s wisdom and experience was a part of his mental processing. Miguel Ramirez, social learning, and Richard Ramirez are a trio that was inevitable and unavoidable.

First, the Social Learning theory is defined as when people or in this case juveniles learn from each other from either observation, imitation, or modeling. The version of this theory

Another explanation of criminal behaviour is demonstrated by the social learning theory. Socialisation can take many forms, including friends, family, media and influences in a person's life, such as school and religion (Bordens & Horowitz, 2002). The social learning theory suggests that it is through these influences that aggression can stem from. Bandura (1961) suggested that aggressive behaviour is learned in either one of 2 ways; by direct experience which is based on operant conditioning or by vicarious (indirect) experience which is based on observational learning. This was demonstrated in Bandura’s 'Bobo Doll Study' which involved male and female participants from 3 to 5 years old with half the participants exposed to aggressive models interacting with a life-sized inflatable Bobo doll whilst the other half were exposed to models with no aggression. Children in the aggressive condition repeated most of the physical and verbal aggressive behaviour whereas children in the non-aggressive showed virtually no aggression. The findings support the Social Learning theory as the aggressive behaviour displayed came directly from watching an aggressive model (Bandura,

Social learning theory is a theory related to classical and operant conditioning, which proposed by Albert Bandura in 1977. According to Albert Bandura, people are active agents in learning while they use cognition and social interaction in learning (Rogers, 2010). Albert Bandura considered that people are living in the environment, therefore, human behavior should be studied in social context rather than in laboratory (Bandura, 1977).

There 's a old quote that says, "Be careful who your friends are because you will pick up their bad traits." Many different factors can influence our learning. At some point in our lives, we have learned by observing the behaviors of others. Observation can play a very important role in determining what and how we learn. It can have positive or negative effects on one 's development and behavior, especially in children. This is demonstrated in the social learning theory.

The behaviour we observed is models. In social life, children encompassed with effective people like parents, siblings, friends, tv characters and teachers etc. They attract to certain people and encode the behaviour and later imitate the behaviour interest to them regardless whether it is appropriate or inappropriate for them.

According to Anderson (2001), “Violent Media is defined as media that shows a depiction of any kind of intentional harm.” This can include media such as cartoons, television shows, and video games. Over the years, this type of media has greatly increased it’s popularity and can be seen on many televisions across the United States. There are statistics that prove this, such as, “73% of fourth grade boys report that the majority of their favorite games are violent ones”(Anderson 2001 p. 354) People have begun to question this type of media’s effect on aggressive and even violent behavior, especially in children. I believe this violent media and its exposure to the youth is leading to the use of violent behavior in children. Therefore, I agree with the claim that watching violent movies and playing video games leads to aggressive and violent behavior.

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

There are many factors that go into how we grow up into the people we are today. Growing up teaches us right from wrong and it’s the time when we find out who we are as people and what we think of ourselves. All of the factors that go into figuring out who we are can help us in the end or in some cases make us worse off. One factor that can make us worse off is if we have negative self-efficacy.

Based on the theory, the more an observer likes or respects the model, the more likely he/she is to replicate the behavior (Friedman & Shustack, 2012). The distinct characteristic of this model is that observational learning allows learning occur without being directly rewarded or punished for the behavior, which can be used to argue against behaviorism (Friedman & Shustack, 2012).The example of vicarious learning is, when a child sees her brother being punished for not showing respect to others she does not need to perform her disrespect behavior to receive the punishment (negative reinforcement) herself but will learn vicariously, through her observation of not to disrespect people. A study of examining the effect of observing a social performance with a negative outcome on a group of young children age 8-11, their fear-related beliefs and cognitive processing, found that vicarious learning experiences in childhood may contribute to the development of social anxiety

To prove that same behaviors will be learned by individuals following the action of the models and altering their own behaviors, Albert Bandura conducted a famous experiment, known as the Bobo doll experiment in 1961 (McLeod, 2014). Before the experiment, Albert Bandura made 4 predictions. First, children that observed adult acting aggressively will be more likely to act the same. Second, children that observed non-aggressive adults will be less likely to act aggressively. Thirdly, children will

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.

Bandura (1977) believed that humans actively process information and relate to the relationship of their behaviours and its consequences (McLeod, 2011). In this case, siblings and I were actively processing information through the television shows that we saw. In the Bandura’s (1961) Bobo Doll Experiment shows a study of social behaviours through imitation and observation (Mcleod, 2011). Bandura, Ross and Ross (1961) tested 36 boys and 36 girls. The children were divided into three groups equally. The first group of 24 children were exposed to aggressive role model. The children had to watch the role model act aggressively towards a toy called “Bobo doll” for 10 minutes. The second group of 24 children were exposed to non-aggressive role model for also 10 minutes. The third group of 24 children were used as control group where they were not exposed to anything. In my situation, my sister was categorised in the first group. When tested, the result was that the children who watched the aggressive model were more likely to act aggressively than the non-aggressive and control group children (Mcleod, 2011). In my situation, my sister is categorised in the first group of children. As she observed the violence in the television show, she applied it to me and my brother. Bandura (1961) also concluded that girls were more physically aggressive than the