Social Learning Say What? Essay

Over 70 volunteers responded to an ad in the paper for the experiment and went through psychological tests

This might make the results more bias because the children could be from well of families or from poorer families there is no mix of the social ethnics. The region where it was conducted could also have an effect on the experiment as it might have been prone to more violent behaviours than other regional areas. This is difficult to link this experiment it to a larger diverse population because it was from only one place. Race of the children was not specified which is important because some racial backgrounds will be stricter than others and their religion might interfere with the proceedings of the experiment and their ethnic background.

Psychologically this could make the children feel self conscious and not like themselves. Some of the people who originally took part in this experiment “still regard the experiment as

Bandura suggested children learn from watching adults – referred to as ‘Bobo doll experiment’. Three groups of children watched a film of a variation in behaviour in adults towards a doll.

This experiment was useful as it helped gain knowledge on a new social psychological theory. This is one of those experiments that had a huge influence on the

The fundamentals of the social learning theory significantly describe offenders and their criminal behavior which is learned based on observation and imitation. A researcher by the name of Albert Bandura along with coworkers tested the social learning theory with several experiments on children and their imitation of aggression based on what they saw and were exposed to. Bandura’s focus was to prove that human behavior such as aggression is learned through social imitations and copying the actions of others. Walters (1966) gives details about the Bobo doll experiment and explains its purpose related to learning a violent behavior based on observation. In the experiment, the tested subjects were children of both sexes, ranging from the ages of three to six years. Some of the children were exposed to a non-aggressive adult, while the other children were placed in a room with an aggressive adult who would both physically and verbally attack the Bobo doll. The control group in the experiment was not exposed to any adult. During the second phase of the experiment, the children were left in a room by themselves with the toys, and watched to see if they would demonstrate the aggressive behavior like that of which they observed adults doing earlier. Walter (1966) describes the results as “children who had been exposed to an aggressive model showed more imitative physical and verbal

The subjects participated in a three-week field experiment at a 200 acre Boy Scout camp at Robber’s Cave State Park in Oklahoma. There were twenty-two 11, and 12-year-old boys who had never met were

Abstract In the experiment, the experimenters studied the effect attractive faces had on newborn infants. The experimenters’ hypothesis was blank. They tested their hypothesis by measuring the time newborn infants looked at attractive and unattractive faces. From the finding of this experiment, it was found that newborn infants prefer upright attractive faces.

A total of 59 participants took part in this experiment. They were split into two independent experimental groups, one being the control group, and the other the experimental group. There were 30 participants in the control group, and 29 participants in the experimental group. The male to female ratio was fairly equal with

Overall there were mainly girls in each experiment (experiment one: 47% and experiment two: 48%). This is a limitation because it does not give each gender an accurate sample pool. The results of the experiment would be mainly representing female children. Also, the sample sizes varied from experiment one (fifty children) to experiment two (twenty-three children). This causes the results not to be representative of the general population.

Social learning theory, developed by Bandura, discusses how people learn from one another through observation, modeling, and imitation bridging an individual’s attention, memory and motivation. Social learning theory identifies the importance of cognition, observable behavior, individual self-efficacy, and the extent of how the events surrounding an individual affect them; their locus of control. Social learning theory also looks at individual problem behavior being influenced by positive or negative reinforcement (Ashford & LeCroy, 2012).

The experiment starts inside a playroom, participants are boys and girls around 5 years old.

The researchers included one hundred thirty-five children in their experiment in order to test their hypothesis. Out of these children, ninety were considered

Akers and Sellers (2013) has stated that social learning theory is an expanded theory of differential association processes and improves it with differential reinforcement and other principles of the behavior theory. They added classical conditioning (the sharpening of involuntary reflex behavior); discriminative stimuli (internal stimuli that lead to signals for behavior); schedules of reinforcement (rewards and punishment ratio following behavioral feedback); and other theories of behavior (Akers & Sellers, 2013).

The paper will focus on the application of the social learning theory through the use of video games that incorporate moral choices into their design. In this paper, I will first describe what the social learning theory is and its implications. I will discuss findings that pertain to the social learning theory and through violent television and operant conditioning from violent video games. I will also explore studies focusing on the impact of moral choices in video games on decision making and moral disengagement. From the data, I will determine my own hypothesis as well as a methodical experiment relevant to the focus of this paper.