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The Bandura Study Essay

Decent Essays

The Bandura Study

A) The Bandura study aimed to see if children copying aggression that they see in adults. In the study a male or female model was aggressive toward a bobo doll, the children were then observed to see if they imitated any behaviour shown by the model, or if they were/weren’t aggressive. There were also 2 control groups, one of which had seen a non aggressive male/female model and another group was observed after seeing no model.

The results showed that the children were more aggressive when they had seen the aggressive model. Boys were, on average, more aggressive than girls. The gender of the model also had an affect on the behaviour of the children. Boys were more …show more content…

This may have made the child more aggressive than it would usually have been which would show that child as being more aggressive and so affecting the results. There was also a big cultural change in the years following Banduras’ study. When this study took place there were very stereotypical views of men and women, this means that the children may have been reluctant to copy the behaviour of the aggressive female model, but were more likely to copy the behaviour of the aggressive male model, because society at the time expected more aggression from men. Girls may also have been less aggressive at that time because it was what was expected from society and vice versa with the boys.

2. Another problem with snapshot studies as they really go against the point of developmental psychology. They don’t look at how children develop and change over time, a snapshot just looks at one aspect over a very short period of time. Generalisations are then made of all children and young people, from the results of a few children of a certain age. In the Bandura study he used children of a nursery age and observed them for only 20mins; the results are then seen has having big implications on television and computer games. The results could have been like they were because children of that age are impressionable or that they feel that they have to copy adults more than older children,

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