SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS’ IMPACTS ON BEHAVIOURISM – WHY THEY WERE REVOLUTIONARY, AND WHY THEY ARE DISAPPEARING Shirley Lan Bao (WHS)
Figure 1: Sourced from “simplypsychology.org”
Human behaviour is arguably one of the most difficult things for us to understand. It is a product of a great number of interrelated factors, such as genetics, individual thoughts and feelings, social interactions with other individuals, our social identity (the interaction within and between groups,) and the physical environment.
The results suggested that: 1. Children who observed the aggressive model, were far more likely to carry out similar violent actions towards the Bobo doll compared with other children who were placed in the non-aggressive or control group.
Scientists over the past centuries have been investigating into human behaviour - why do we behave a certain way? Is our brain capable of recognising certain factors, and adjust the way we behave?
2. Boys imitated more physically aggressive acts than girls, though there was little difference in the verbal aggression between boy and girls.
Due to our lack of understanding towards the organ that controls human behaviour itself – the brain, it seems quite impossible for us to truly work out the reason for certain actions. However, throughout the last century, scientists and sociologists have been conducting numerous psychological and social experiments, in attempts to provide us with some crucial answers about why human behave a certain way. The results are definitely revolutionary – and have opened new doors for both the medical science and social science world.
These results were definitely ground-breaking for the science world. It agreed with Bandura’s “Social Learning Theory”, which suggested the importance of observing, modelling and imitating behaviours of others as well as remained revolutionary in raising awareness over the field of childcare. It acted as the evidence that supported the idea that experiences at childhood may result in certain behaviours in adulthood. Nowadays, people still refer to this experiment to raise concerns about the effects of television, computer games, social media on the development and growth of a child’s personality and morality and are all cited as reasons for an increased tendency of young people in society towards violence.
Do we mirror certain actions without noticing? Observational Learning - The Bobo Doll Experiment (1961, 63) The Bobo Doll experiment, conducted during the 1960s, by Albert Bandura, was a series of experiments on observational learning. Its aim was to determine whether social behaviours, such as aggression, can be acquired by observation and imitation. During this experiment, 36 boys and 36 girls were taken from the Stanford University nursery and were each exposed to different scenarios: children were encouraged to watch an adult’s behaviour towards a toy (the Bobo doll). Three models were used – the aggressive model – where some children would watch the adult be aggressive and violent towards the Bobo Doll, the non-aggressive model, where the adult would be playing quietly with the doll, and the control model, where a small group of children watched no particular action.
Are our adult fears a result of our childhood experiences? Classical Conditioning – The Little Albert Experiment (1920) The Little Albert Experiment is considered to be one of the most unethical psychological. Experiments of all time. The experiment was conducted by scientists Watson and Rayner in attempts to investigate whether an infant can be conditioned (‘programmed’) to fear an object, by appearing it simultaneously with a loud, feararousing sound. This was intended to answer a popular question at the time – whether humans can also be a subject of classical conditioning. 3
