See Aggression, Do Aggression What is aggression? Is it hunting for sport? Is it a child yelling and screaming because they don’t get their way? Or is it simply getting frustrated at something and lashing out. The true definition of aggression can be nearly impossible to capture. An extremely important and profound study was done by Albert Bandura and his associates Dorothea Ross and Sheila Ross, in 1961 at Stanford University. Bandura had 4 predictions for his experiment he was about to test: 1.) That children who observed an adult acting aggressively would be likely to act aggressively even without the adult model present. 2.) The children who observed the non-aggressive adult model would be less aggressive than the children who observed the aggressive model; the non-aggressive exposure group would also be less aggressive than the control group. 3.) Children would be more likely to imitate models of the samesex rather than models of the opposite-sex. 4.) Boys would behave more aggressively than girls. .
METHOD Bandura and is associates had to get help from the head of Stanford Nursing School. They were able to observe thirty-six boys, and thirty-six girls for their learned aggression experiment. The average age of the children was 4 years and 4 months.
Experimental Conditions Twenty-four children were assigned to the control group. The rest of the children were first divided into two groups; one which observed aggressive adults, the other observing not aggressive adults. These groups were divided again into male and female subjects. Finally, each of these groups were divided so that half of the subjects were exposed to same-sex models and half to opposite-sex models. This gave Bandura 8 experimental groups and 1 control group..
The Experimental Procedure The children were brought in separately to a room
filled with toys, trinkets, coloring books, among other harmless things. There they were observing an adult do some of the activities. In the aggressive group, the adult would at some point would hit and kick and inflatable Bobo doll, would throw things and have a tantrum. The non-aggressive group would not throw the tantrum or attack the doll. Once the adult left, the children were left alone to see how they would react after seeing what the adult did, respective to their behavior.
Results Bandura found that children did indeed tend to simulate the behavior of the adult they observed. Findings found that the boys were more likely to act violently than girls, just like everyone tends to think that boys are more prone to violence. Results were too inconsistent to say if nonaggresion inhibited overall aggressive behaviors.