Psychology Long Questions

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Psychology Long Questions

In order to understand how human behaviour is learnt and/or develops over time, many studies are carried out on children.

Bandura, Ross and Ross (Aggression)

Tajfel (Intergroup Discrimination)

  1. Describe the procedure of each study.
  2. Comment on what this research tells us about children’s behaviour.
  3. Evaluate two problems of using children as participants in psychological investigations, using examples from the above named studies.
  4. Describe one change to each named that would allow it to be carried out in accordance to today’s ethical standards. State how this might affect the results.

a) The procedure of the Bandura study is as follows. The children were tested individually; first they were taken to a room with toys and observed an adult model in one of two conditions. In the non-aggressive condition, the model sat and played quietly, in the aggressive condition the model sat and played for about a minute, but then got up and started assaulting the Bobo doll in the corner of the room with a mallet. The child was then taken to another room full of toys and told that they couldn’t play with them. This was a mild aggression arousal. The child was lead to anther room with a Bobo doll in it, where it was observed whether the child imitated the adult they had seen.

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The procedure for the Tajfel study is as follows. The participants were asked whether they preferred one picture or another and divided up accordingly. This gave a sense of belonging to a group. They were then shown a matrix of numbers and told that each number represented money. They were then asked to allocate a number to a member of their team and one number to a member of the other team.

b) We can learn a lot about child behaviour from these studies. The Bandura study shows us that children are very likely to imitate things they see ...

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