Bandura Albert Bandura and the Bobo Effect

Bandura

Albert Bandura and the Bobo Effect

Few research psychologists have been as directly and as singularly influential in shaping the way we think about learning and behavior as Albert Bandura, and few single experiments have been as significant and noteworthy as the Bobo experiment he conducted with his colleagues in 1961. Through this experiment and through his entire body of theoretical and research-based work, Bandura was able to demonstrate that traits like aggression and other features of human behavior are learned by example and social conditioning, which was an important breakthrough in overall psychological understanding. The following paragraphs present a brief overview of Bandura's life and his most famous experiment, situating his immense contributions in an understanding of the man himself.

Albert Bandura: A Brief Biography

Born in the tiny town of Mundare in Alberta, Canada in December of 1925, Albert Bandura is of Polish descent on his father's side and Ukrainian on his mother's. Both of his parents had emigrated from their native countries as adolescents, and they and their family grew up with very little in the way of luxury or resources for things like education. Still, Bandura's parents encouraged him to experience as much as he could of the world outside Mundare, and during one summer off from high school Bandura secured work as a carpenter in Edmonds, Alberta -- work that would eventually pay his way through college at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Taking a course in psychology as a "filler" course was to have a profound effect on Bandura's life and on psychology (Pajares, 2004).

Graduate studies at the University of Iowa completed Bandura's formal degree-conferring education, and in 1953 Bandura accepted what was initially a one year contract as a simple instructor at Stanford, but this quickly turned into a three-year assistant professorship and then a full and permanent professorship. It was at Stanford that Bandura developed his theories and carried out almost all of his experiments, including the famed Bobo experiment already mentioned and discussed in greater detail below. Primarily concerned with learning and development, Bandura has made significant contributions to the understanding of aggression, self-efficacy, social learning theory, social cognitive theory, moral agency, and more. Still heralded as one of the greatest psychologists living and indeed one of the most influential psychologists bar none, Bandura's legacy is truly larger than life (Pajares, 2004).

The Bobo Experiment

Despite the funny-sounding name of the experiment, the elements of learning and behavior Bandura demonstrated in this experiment were quite serious. In an attempt to show that behavior such as aggression was learned, Bandura exposed different groups of subjects -- children ages 3 to 6 -- to the Bobo toy, am inflatable clown with a weighted bottom that stands about five feet tall and can be hit repeatedly without real consequence. One group of children was exposed to the toy without any adult role model, one group saw an adult passively interacting with the Bobo doll and other toys, and one group was exposed to an adult being verbally and physically aggressive with Bobo. It was when the children (i.e. subjects) were given a chance to interact with the doll that the real purpose of the experiment could be seen (ER, 2012).