Study of Learning and Beliefs
Using Bobo The Clown doll in a psychology experiment helped him to contradict a theory of behavior promoted by more famous psychologists. When television programmers blocked his ideas, he said he sympathized with Bobo The Clown.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
AB was born in a small, prairie town. His parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe (Poland and Ukraine). His father laid track for the trans-Continental railway and turned a heavily wooded homestead into a working farm. His mother ran a delivery service, transporting goods from the railway station to local stores.
CHILDHOOD THOUGHTS OF AN ADULT CAREER
Raised on a farm in a small, rural community, AB worked hard to help his father on the farm. He was aware that all the other adults in the area were involved in manual labor careers. AB pictured himself working hard when he grew up. Books and magazines opened his eyes to the bigger world, with adults working in offices and with people not dressed for farming.
EDUCATION
Hoping to not disappoint his parents by avoiding helping on the family farm, AB chose to attend college but without a specific career plan. Ironically, eventually as a psychologist, he developed a “Social Cognitive Theory” which emphasized that fortuitous events often play a role in determining a person’s life path. Perhaps this theory was born out of AB’s own experience in college, when he was reading a college curriculum catalogue and discovered an introductory psychology course which seemed interesting and would fill a slot in his class schedule.
RANDOM EVENTS MAY INFLUENCE A CAREER PATH
In addition to randomly discovering a college course in psychology, AB’s choice of graduate school for psychology also proved fortuitous since it was home to some of the most recognized names in psychology, at a time of great excitement in the field, when many psychologists were hoping to elevate psychology to be accepted as a science of human behavior, mirgeology,the rigor and predictive power of the natural sciences: biology, chemistry, geology and physics.
Central to studying human behavior, the Chairman of the Psychology Department had developed an influential theory of learning that was rooted in the work of early behaviorists. Eventually, AB’s studies on aggression contradicted the core of that theory and became a staple of introductory psychology classes. His work on the role of the people’s beliefs in shaping their behavior transformed American psychology.
PSYCHOLOGY THEORIES MAY BE ACCEPTED AND WIDELY USED TO IMPROVE BEHAVIOR AND MENTAL HEALTH
AB’s Social Cognitive Theory of Human Functioning emphasized people’s capacity for self-reflection and personal agency, and his extensive writing and research contributed to the understanding of personality formation, cognition, morality, and the treatment of mental disorders like phobias.
His “Theory of Self-Efficacy” – people’s belief in their own competence and ability to exert control over their behavior and social environment – has been widely applied across many areas, including education, public health and drug and alcohol abuse.
LABORATORY STUDIES MAY SUPPORT A PSYCHOLOGY THEORY
AB’s most famous laboratory studies involved using dolls. In the first study, nursery school children watched an adult heaping verbal and physical abuse on an inflatable Bobo The Clown doll, punching it in the nose, kicking it, hitting it on the head with a mallet and throwing it around the room. When the children were then given a chance to interact with a similar doll, they copied the adult’s abusive behavior and produced additional forms of abuse that they thought up on their own.
In contrast, children who watched an adult interacting peacefully with a doll, or who were not shown a model at all, were significantly less aggressive.
(Editor’s note – Hopefully, each child’s parent(s) or guardian were fully informed and agreed in advance, to the goals and methods of the experiment involving their respective children. Also, that there was a plan to resolve any potential emotional and/or behavioral harm to any child, resulting from such experiments.
It is doubtful that such an experiment would be undertaken or permitted these days, where there is more concern about the potential for mental harm involving test subjects – both human and animal – which effects may be long-lasting and difficult to resolve. There are other ways to conduct experiments involving vulnerable humans (e.g., children). For example, when child abuse is suspected, the child involved may be asked to play with dolls. How that child interacts with the doll – treating the doll with aggression or abusing the doll – may provide enough observed behavior to conclude that the child was modeling others’ behavior, which could be probed by gentle questions from a trained psychologist.)
Later studies indicated that just showing a film of an adult acting aggressively could produce similar results. And the children’s response to the adult model could be influenced by whether the aggressive behavior was rewarded or punished.
The Bobo doll findings challenged a basic tenet of classical behaviorism: that if a behavior is rewarded, it will persist and sometimes increase and that if it is punished, it will diminish and eventually cease. In contrast, the Bobo doll studies demonstrated what any parent or schoolteacher knew: that children also learn from observing other people’s behavior.
AB stated that behaviorism’s narrow focus on reward and punishment had seemed to him “discordant with the obvious social reality that much of what we learn is through the power of social modeling.”
Another psychologist noted that strict behaviorism, as championed by famous psychologists like John Watson and Edward Skinner, made sense when applied to pigeons or rats but was less influential when it came to humans.
The results of the Bobo doll experiments were at odds with behaviorism and conflicted with the then reigning mental health theory of the time: psychoanalysis, which held that vicarious aggression – watching a violent fil, for example – would provide a catharsis, diminishing the need to act out aggressive impulses. The distinction might seem academic, but its outcome had real-world implications at a time of increasing public anxiety about the effects of television violence on children and coverage of war which brought combat scenes into people’s living rooms on their tv screens.
CAREER CHALLENGE – DISAGREEING WITH ‘ESTABLISHED’ IDEAS AND / OR BIG BUSINESS PROFITABILITY
AB’s research did not sit well with the television broadcast industry. His findings were criticized in articles commissioned by the networks. AB later learned that the National Association of Broadcasters had secretly blocked his participation in a committee formed by the U.S. Surgeon General to evaluate the effects of television violence. Said AB: “I began to feel a kinship with the battered Bobo doll.”
In the end, AB’s work won out, his findings becoming even more relevant in a world where social media and a 24-hour-a-day news cycle have afforded violence models far greater reach.
RESEARCHING FEARS TO HELP PEOPLE COPE
AB’s research increasingly focused on beliefs and self-reflection and the role they played in human behavior and development: “How people talk about and to themselves.” He found that people’s confidence in their ability to perform a task or to control something that was threatening, could have a remarkable impact on how they lived their lives. Providing people with positive models to follow and an environment in which they could succeed, could treat a range of disabling problems, including phobias.
In studies, AB and his collaborators were able to eliminate longstanding fears of snakes in a few hours. The treatment “instilled a robust sense of coping efficacy, transformed attitudes toward the phobic objects from abhorrence to liking, wiped out anxiety, biological stress reactions and phobic behavior.
KEEPING BUSINESS TOTALLY SEPARATE FROM PERSONAL IS RESPECTED
AB was known as a highly organized teacher and a prolific writer and researcher who never failed to get excited about new projects. A former student described him as “absolutely lacking in personality tics and quirks and who drew a strict line between his personal and professional lives. If AB’s cat had been run over in the morning and you met with him in the afternoon, he would not be talking about how his cat was run over by a car.”
CAREER SATISFACTION
In addition to having his research conclusions about the effects of modeling behavior be widely accepted within the scientific community, over strong opposition from businesses whose profits might have been affected, AB used his Social Cognitive Theory to educate the public about how to examine various topics, from the reduction of disease, to how individuals and societies fall into morally transgressive behavior.
If there was a single principle undergirding his work, it was the idea of ‘Personal Agency’ – that people, through their beliefs about themselves and the processes of self-reflection and self-regulation, can exert control over their lives.
Said AB: “If you look at my life path, you try to make the most of whatever is there. And to do that, you have to believe that through your actions, you can influence the course of your life.”
