Learning Ethical Issues in Observational

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Ethical Issues in Observational Learning

It is one of the primary goals -- arguably the primary gal -- of psychology to understand and explain the way the human brain works, from taking in information to the processing of this information and ultimately to the decision-making process and behaviors engaged in by an individual in relation to the information they have received. Though this is an oversimplification of the issue, it is true in a very basic sense, and all psychological inquiries fit into this schema. Much psychological research, such as the investigation, diagnosis, and treatment of various disorders, is concerned with a very narrow and specific investigation of these basic psychological queries. Other investigations take a much broader approach, and attempt to understand and explain learning and behavior in a more general and comprehensive sense.

One such investigation was the Bobo Experiment conducted by Albert Bandura. After witnessing adult models aggressively beating, sitting on, and throwing an inflated doll, children were then presented with the same toys that were in the room during the model's aggressive behavior (Isom 1998). Other children were presented with the same toys, but had not witnessed the aggressive behavior of an adult model. In the experiment, children who witnessed the aggressive behavior were almost all equally aggressive towards the Bobo doll as the models. (Isom 1998). Bandura, and many others since, have interpreted the results of this experiment as evidence of social or observational learning, asserting that aggressive behavior is something that children learn by witnessing it. According to the theory, this makes them believe that the behavior is acceptable and therefore something that they themselves may act out (Isom 1998).

Though the idea that people -- specifically children -- learn by watching and imitating others might seem simple, but it was somewhat revolutionary when Bandura proposed it as an alternative to learning through direct reinforcement (Van Wagner 2009). There is ample anecdotal evidence that supports the theory as well; I can remember learning how to make coffee long before anyone taught me how to do anything in the kitchen. Simply witnessing my mother make the coffee time and time again imprinted itself on me. Though I wasn't able to use the stove top or handle the kettle of boiling water for years, of course, I knew every step that needed to be performed and the exact shade of brown that the finished product -- with cream -- should be. Though this is a more specific instance of observational learning than what was identified by Bandura in the Bobo experiment, which classified an entire class of behavior as learned rather than just a specific task, the basic underlying principle it illustrates is the same.

It is very possible that Bandura and those that followed should have been more selective in the conclusions they drew from the Bobo experiment. It is fairly clear that there was learning going on when the children observed aggressive behavior, but leaping immediately to the conclusion that what was learned was aggression, and not the specific behaviors exhibited by the adult models and repeated by the children, seems at least a little presumptive. If it can be assumed that the children in the experiment had never witnessed the specific behaviors of the models prior to the experiment (which would have been necessary to establish for the experiment itself to be valid), then the behavior might have been simply frightening to them, and acting out the behaviors might have been a method of familiarizing themselves with the behavior so as to understand it and make it less frightening. Though the end result would be the same desensitization to aggression, the possibility of this mechanism is important.

This possibility, and the construction and results of the Bobo experiment as they now stand, also raise some serous ethical concerns. If the fear I theorized above were actually at work in the learning process, then simply subjecting the children to the behavior would create ethical problems by needlessly frightening the children. Of even greater concern, however, were the long-term effects of the Bobo experiment on the children involved in the experiment that witnessed the aggressive behavior of the adult models. Eight months after the time of the experiment, forty percent of these children still exhibited the same type of aggressive behavior that they had emulated during the experiment (Isom 1998). This suggests that even this single instance of exposure to aggressive behavior was enough to create a long-term pattern of behavior in the children. If the experiment truly caused long-term behavioral differences, especially negative ones, in the children involved, it was completely unethical in the first place.