Explain social identity theory with referance to relevant research studies

 An experiment conducted by Bandura, Ross and Ross support the learning theory, they investigated whether children would imitate aggression modeled by an adult and whether or not imitation would be more likely with same sex models. 72 kids from both genders (aged 3-6) and the same nursery of a university were the participants of this lab and observational experiment, which they places in different conditions. The children were place into groups regarding the levels of aggressively with another pair (matched pair design), the first group had aggressive models, the second group had non-aggressive models whereas the third group was the control group who had no models in their rooms.

Some kids were told they could not play with the toys to increase levels of aggressively in the children, and the results supported the social learning theory. The children who had observed the aggressive models were more aggressive than those who had non-aggressive models and they also found girls imitated verbal aggression whereas boys imitated physical aggression and both imitated the same sex-models.  Although this experiment gave empirical results and showed controlled conditions it was not ecologically valid to generate it to the whole population because the children were from the same place where they were raised the same way and how they were paired could have been a biased pair up from the teachers. It’s also not very ecologically valid because the children’s past was not taken into account.

Charlton et al is a refuting study much more ecologically valid because they observed St. Helena who were about the receive television for the first time. They filmed children in the playground for two weeks when they had television and came back years later and filmed again the students playing in the playground. The recording shows no increase in aggressive behaviors but an increase in pro-social behavior as well as a decrease in anti-social behavior. At the end he concluded that the introduction of TV had no negative effects on children meaning that it contracted with the theory that media can influence behavior of others. They introduced TV to the island of St. Helana who never had it, this was done to see how violence shown on TV would affect the children in the island. There are many criticisms to this study though since it’s a very collective community and could have altered the behavior of kids, meaning that they the kids would have felt monitored at all times, or that they knew every single person on this island. This resolves in this study not able to be generalized to the whole world.

    Social learning theory is suggests that that attention, retention, motor reproduction and motivation are needed to learn behavior and it explain the social norms which people have. Although there are studies for and against this theory, Bandura provided empirical data to support his study but his studies lack ecological validity.