The Bobo Doll Experiment began by placing one of the children from the test groups in a room with an adult. The subject sat in one corner of the room, with appealing toys to play with, such as potato prints and sticker activities.
The adult sat in the other corner of the room, with toys, as well as a Bobo doll and mallet. The child was not allowed to play or interact with these toys.
For the children in group two, after one minute of playing with the toys, the adult would begin to verbally and physically attack the doll for a period of 10 minutes.
For the third group tested, the adult would sit quietly and play peacefully with the toys for ten minutes.
The control group sat in the room for ten minutes with no adult present.
The next stage of the Bobo Doll Experiment was to take the subject into another room, which was filled with interesting toys. The child was not permitted to play with these toys, being told that they were for other children to play with. This was intended to build up the levels of frustration within the child.
The child was then taken into yet another room filled with interesting toys, some of an aggressive type, some non-aggressive; the room also contained the Bobo doll and the mallet. The child was watched through a one-way mirror, and a number of types of behaviour were assessed.
The first factor measured was physical aggression, consisting of hitting the doll with the mallet or punching, kicking or sitting on the doll
Verbal aggression was also assessed, whether it was general abuse or an imitation of phrases used by the adult role-model.
The third measurement was the amount of times the mallet was used to display other forms of aggression than hitting the doll. The final behaviours studied were modes of aggression, shown by the subject, which were not direct imitations of the role-model's behaviour.
results.
The results for the Bobo Doll Experiment showed that children who were exposed to the aggressive model were more likely to show imitative aggressive behaviour themselves.
The measurements for verbally aggressive behaviour again showed that children exposed to aggressive role models were more likely to imitate this behaviour. The levels of verbal aggression expressed were about the same for boys and girls.
Subjects in the Bobo Doll Experiment exposed to the non-aggressive model, or no model at all, showed little imitative aggressive behavior. This finding partially proved prediction two, with children exposed to a passive role model showing less imitative aggression.
However, the results did not fully prove this prediction, as there was no discernible difference in the imitative aggression levels between groups one and three.
Male subjects exposed to non-aggressive role models were less likely to use the mallet to hit the Bobo doll. Strangely, male subjects placed with non-aggressive female models were more likely to use the mallet than the control group.
CONCLUSION.
Bandura found that girls were much less likely to be physically violent, but were equally as prone to verbal aggression as boys.
There were a few criticisms of the experiment; the Bobo doll springs back upright when it is hit and there is a strong possibility that the children saw it as a game rather than anything else.
There was a follow up experiment, in 1963, which used the same methodology as the initial experiment of the Bobo Doll Experiment, in 1965. It establish the effects of rewarding or punishing bad and violent behaviour. Children, who witnessed the model being punished for aggressive behaviour, were much less likely to follow suit. Interestingly, there was no change in aggression when the model was rewarded for bad behaviour.
