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Alfred Bandura's Theory Of Social Cognitive Theory

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Cognitive theory is one of the five developmental theories in developmental psychology. Found within cognitive theory is social cognitive theory. Social cognitive theory suggests that children and adults can learn novel responses merely by observing the behavior of a model, and make mental notes as they observe these responses. They use these mental representations to reproduce the observed model’s behavior. This theory belongs to psychologist, Alfred Bandura. Bandura thought humans to be cognitive beings and that the information they processed played huge role in their learning and development. One of his known study’s is the Bobo doll study. This study demonstrated that children can display aggressive behaviors through observing aggressive responses without using classical or operant conditioning. In Bandura’s experiment, he had children watch a short clip that included an adult model hitting an inflatable doll with a mallet as well as throwing balls at the doll while shouting random words. Some children saw the adult model being praised and others saw the adult model being punished. In addition, others saw the model receive no consequences for their aggressive actions. After this, children were brought into a playroom filled with the inflatable bobo dolls. Children who saw a rewarded or no-consequence model, acted aggressively. From this scenario, there is also latent learning where there is learning that occurs, but is not evident in the person’s behavior. The children
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