Social Cognitive Theory: How we learn from others.
Social cognitive theory was developed by professor Albert Bandura. This theory provides an insight of how people shape and are shaped by their environment. It focuses on observational learning and modelling, and the impact of self-efficacy on the shaping of behavior. It refers people as active agents who both influence and are influenced by their environment.
Origins : The Bobo Doll experiments
In 1960s, Bandura and his team conducted some observational learnings called Bobo Doll experiments. Some pre-school children were exposed to an aggressive or nonaggressive adult model to see if they would imitate the model’s behavior.
In the aggressive condition, the model was verbally and physically aggressive towards an inflated Bobo doll in the presence of a child. Then the child was taken to another room to play with toys. Child’s play was stopped after two minutes intentionally to frustrate the participants. Then the child was taken to a third room to play with toys including a Bobo doll. To the researchers surprise, the children in the aggressive condition showed an aggressive behavior towards the Bobo doll. And the boys showed additional aggression than the girls.
In the subsequent experiments, a group was shown films of the aggressive model and another group was shown films of an…
