Bobo doll experiment conclusion

During the s, Albert Bandura conducted a series of experiments on observational learning, collectively known as the Bobo doll experiments. Two of the experiments are described below:

Aim

Bandura () conducted a controlled experiment study to investigate if social behaviors (i.e., aggression) can be acquired by observation and imitation.

Sample

Bandura, Ross, and Ross () tested 36 boys and 36 girls from the Stanford University Nursery School aged between 3 to 6 years old.

The researchers pre-tested the children for how aggressive they were by observing the children in the nursery and judged their aggressive behavior on four 5-point rating scales.

It was then possible to match the children in each group so that they had similar levels of aggression in their everyday behavior.

The experiment is, therefore, an example of a matched pairs design.

To test the inter-rater reliability of the observers, 51 of the children were rated by two observers independently, and their rating