Key study: The Bo-Bo doll
(Bandura, Ross and Ross, 1961)
Aims
To see whether children will imitate behaviour that they have observed, not at the time that they see it but later in a similar context.
Hypotheses:
Participants exposed to an aggressive model will…
......
Participants exposed to a non-aggressive model will…
......
Control participants who are not exposed to a model will...
......
Participants who have observed same sex model will
......
Boys will
......
Procedure:
Research method: Experiment with independent measures
IV1: whether they see an aggressive or non-aggressive model or no model
IV2: whether they see a same sex or opposite sex model
IV3: whether the pps are male or female
DV1: number of physical aggressive acts displayed
DV2: Number of verbal aggressive acts displayed
Participants: 72 participants. 36 boys and 36 girls aged 37-69 months enrolled at Stanford University Nursery School
Preparation: The children were rated to see how aggressive they were in various situations. This was done to ensure that there were similar levels of aggression amongst the control group and the experimental groups.
What type of design is this?
Why was this done and why is this a strength of the design?
48 experimental ppt’s placed into a pile of girls and a pile of boys and randomly allocated into either the aggressive or non-aggressive conditions.
Each of the four groups of 12, randomly allocated either to see a male model or a female model. Now there are 8 experimenal conditions.
Make a note of why the random allocation was performed and why this was a strength of the study?
Children were exposed to (watched) one of the 3 main conditions of the experiment. One condition has no model. This was the control. The other conditons were-Aggressive model shown and Non-aggressive model shown
The conditions were further broken down to have female models in two conditions (aggressive AND non aggressive) and male models in the two conditions. Identical sets of toys, mallets and BoBo dolls in each condition.
The experiment Stage One (watching model)
In one condition the female model played aggressively with BoBo after about 1 minute and in the other condition she played in a non-aggressive way and did not touch the mallet. Same with the males. Aggressive play was standardised to a set of moves including; sit on BoBo and punch him and hit him on the head with a mallet. Specific language was used such as ‘Sockeroo!’, and ‘sock him in the nose’. In the non-aggressive condition, specific non-aggressive words were used during play.
The experiment Stage Two (aggression arousal)
Another testing lab was set up with some attractive toys that the children should really want to play with. The children were taken there to play, left alone but then told that “you are not allowed to play with these toys, they are special and not to be played with today”.
How would the child react. Make a note of why this was done and why this was an important strength/weakness of the design.
The experiment Stage Three (Data collection)
In the testing condition children were taken to a room with a similar, but non-identical BoBo doll, a mallet, set of toys inlcuding some which are typcially played with in an aggressive way, e.g. toy gun and face hanging from celing which can be hit, and some toys typcially played with in a non-aggressive way.
A one way mirror was used with two experimenters behind the mirror. One of the experimenters does not know the children or which condition they are in (double blind). Inter-scorer reliabilities of .90 (correlation coefficient) were found.
Why was important that the observers didn’t know which conditions the children were in?
Why is this a strength of the study?
Why were there two observers? What was the purpose of this and why was this a strength of the study.
Results
Comparing the aggressive and non-aggressive conditions
Agg / Non agg / ControlPhysical / 50.9 / 4.2 / 3.2
Verbal / 32.7 / 1.4 / 2.4
Mallet / 80.2 / 26.4 / 26.6
Non imitative / 82.6 / 57 / 30.7
Total / 275.9 / 126 / 62.9
The children in the aggressive conditon showed more aggression than those in the non-aggressive condition by more than double the amount seen in the non-aggressive model conditions and more than four times the amount seen in the control condition.
Comparing the girls and the boys
Agg / Non agg / ControlPhysical / Girls / 12.7 / 2.5 / 1.2
Boys / 38.2 / 1.7 / 2.0
Verbal / Girls / 15.7 / 0.3 / 0.7
Boys / 17 / 1.1 / 1.7
Total / Girls / 28.4 / 2.8 / 1.9
Boys / 55.2 / 2.9 / 3.7
The boys showed more nearly twice as much imitative aggression than the girls. However, the girls showed similar levels of physical and verbal aggression, while the boys had a tednecy to model physical aggression much more than verbal aggression. There were similar amounts of verbal aggression modelled by girls and boys.
Comparing the male and female models
The male model tended to be imitated more than the female model by both girls and boys. However, the female model was more influential than the male model when considering the girl’s verbal aggression and non-imitative aggression. On almost every count the boys were influenced more by their same sex model (male) than girls were influenced by their same-sex model (female).
On every type of aggression the boys were either two or three times more likely to be influenced by the male model than the female model.
Conclusions
o Not all behaviour is learnt through direct reinforcement; behaviour that has been simply observed can also become more probable
o This may be more likely when the role model is an adult and the observer is a child
o Male models may be more influential than female models for childen but this may only have been because the modelled behaviour was typcilly associated with males (sex typing)
o Modelling may only happen when the observed behaviour is congruent with social norms, i.e. would boys imitate a man who behaved in a female way?
Evaluation
o If you have completed all the tasks on this sheet you should have already created a list of 4 strengths; go back to these and elaborate them to make sure you have enough material
o You should also now create your own list of weaknesses, think about…
o the research method: lab experiment (validity and reliabiltiy)
o the design matched pairs (validity and reliabiltiy)
o the participants (American 3-6 year olds, from StanfordUniversity Nursery school) and the generalisability
o the ethics of the study (physcial and psychological harm)
o the credibility of the study
o the possible applications of the study