Albert Bandura

Canadian.
Born 1925 in Northern Alberta.
B.A. in Psychology from UBC 1949.
Continues to work at Stanford U.
Was president of the APA 1973.
Behavioral Psychologist.

Learning by Observation

Definition: Learning by observing others.

Modeling: process of observing and imitating a

specific behavior.

Banduras View
Learning would be exceedingly laborious not to
mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on
the effect of their own actions to inform them what
to do

Brain & Observation

Motor Neurons: frontal lobe neurons that fire when
performing certain actions or when observing
another doing so.
The Brains mirroring of anothers action may enable
imitation, language learning and empathy.

The Good

Prosocial behavior: positive constructive, helpful

behavior. The opposite of antisocial behavior.

Ex. Charity, volunteering, helping & general good

behavior & deeds.

The Bad Television

Television is blamed for being a bad role model for

people.
This is mostly because of the amount of violence
and loose morals.

Television
How do they study the effects of T.V. on Children?
Researchers go to remote places without T.V., observe the
children and return again once they receive TV
These studies have huge problems with their methodology.
Problems in population size, recruiting factors, cultural
differences, socioeconomic factors etc.
Longitudinal studies are always problematic and the actual
amount of T.V. watched is normally unknown.

Television is bad..

TV raises the aggression levels in children (Josephson,

1987)
Women who watched violent TV as children were found to
have punched, beaten, or choked another adult over four
times the rate of other women (Huesmann et al., 2003 )
television violence is as strongly correlated with aggressive
behavior as any other behavioral variable that has been
measured (Murray, 2003 )

Television is not so bad . . .

there is little evidence to suggest that a heavier diet of TV

violence is linked to concurrent levels of antisocial behavior

(Gunter, 2000)
in only rare and artificial circumstances that a stimulus
such as television would modify ones behavior (Ashworth
et al., 1985).
70% of the subjects felt that television broadens the minds
of children and exposes them to new ideas and concepts
and generally increases their overall knowledge (Bybee et
al. 1985).

Some critical considerations: Television

Think about certain research issues:

Researchers are selecting the violent content shown to participants
and the children are watching something they may would not
pick for themselves.
As a result it creates an artificial form of aggression.

Television violence may momentarily increase aggression, but long

term effects have not been found when it has been introduced to
a new population.

Some critical considerations: Television

Think about certain research issues:

This outcome was not expected as the idea of television creating
aggressive children is both widespread and common.
Like all people, some children are prone to being aggressive and
violent naturally and factors such as society, socioeconomic
class and relationships with parents should be examined before
placing all of the blame on television.