The influence of media

 

Bobo doll experiment, groundbreaking study on aggression led by psychologist Albert Bandura that demonstrated that children are able to learn through the observation of adult behavior. The experiment was executed via a team of researchers who physically and verbally abused an inflatable doll in front of preschool-age children, which led the children to later mimic the behavior of the adults by attacking the doll in the same fashion.

Bandura’s study on aggression—the experiment for which he is perhaps best known—was carried out in 1961 at Stanford University, where Bandura was a professor. For this study he used 3- and 5-foot (1- and 1.5-metre) inflatable plastic toys called Bobo dolls, which were painted to look like cartoon clowns and were bottom-weighted so that they would return to an upright position when knocked down. The subjects were preschoolers at Stanford’s nursery school and were divided into three groups: one group observed aggressive adult behavior models; another group observed nonaggressive behavior models; and the third group was not exposed to any behavior models.