21-3 How does observational learning differ from associative learning? How may observational learning be enabled by neural mirroring?

Cognition supports observational learning, in which higher animals, especially humans, learn without direct experience, by watching and imitating others. A child who sees his sister burn her fingers on a hot stove learns not to touch it. We learn our native languages and various other specific behaviors by observing and imitating others, a process called modeling.

Picture this scene from an experiment by Albert Bandura, the pioneering researcher of observational learning (Bandura et al., 1961): A preschool child is working on a drawing, while an adult in another part of the room builds with Tinkertoys. As the child watches, the adult gets up and for nearly 10 minutes pounds, kicks, and throws around the room a large inflated Bobo doll, yelling, “Sock him in the nose… . Hit him down… . Kick him.”

The child is then taken to another room filled with appealing toys. Soon the experimenter returns and tells the child she has decided to save these good toys “for the other children.” She takes the now-frustrated child to a third room containing a few toys, including a Bobo doll. Left alone, what does the child do?

Compared with children not exposed to the adult model, those who viewed the model’s actions were more likely to lash out at the doll. Observing the aggressive outburst apparently lowered their inhibitions. But something more was also at work, for the children imitated the very acts they had observed and used the very words they had heard (FIGURE 21.4).

That “something more,” Bandura suggested, was this: By watching models, we experience vicarious reinforcement or vicarious punishment, and we learn to anticipate a behavior’s consequences in situations like those we are observing. We are especially likely to learn from people we perceive as similar to ourselves, or as successful, or as admirable. fMRI scans show that when people observe someone winning a reward (and especially when it’s someone likable and similar to themselves), their own brain reward systems activate, much as if they themselves had won the reward (Mobbs et al., 2009). When we identify with someone, we experience their outcomes vicariously. Even our learned fears may extinguish as we observe another safely navigating the feared situation (Golkar et al., 2013). Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773) had the idea: “We are, in truth, more than half what we are by imitation.”

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On a 1991 hot summer day in Parma, Italy, a lab monkey awaited its researchers’ return from lunch. The researchers had implanted wires next to its motor cortex, in a frontal lobe brain region that enabled the monkey to plan and enact movements. The monitoring device would alert the researchers to activity in that region of the monkey’s brain. When the monkey moved a peanut into its mouth, for example, the device would buzz. That day, as one of the researchers reentered the lab, ice cream cone in hand, the monkey stared at him. As the researcher raised the cone to lick it, the monkey’s monitor buzzed—as if the motionless monkey had itself moved (Blakeslee, 2006; Iacoboni, 2008, 2009).

The same buzzing had been heard earlier, when the monkey watched humans or other monkeys move peanuts to their mouths. The flabbergasted researchers had, they believed, stumbled onto a previously unknown type of neuron (Rizzolatti et al., 2002, 2006). These presumed mirror neurons, they argued, provide a neural basis for everyday imitation and observational learning. When a monkey grasps, holds, or tears something, these neurons fire. And they likewise fire when the monkey observes another doing so. When one monkey sees, its neurons mirror what another monkey does. (For a debate regarding the importance of mirror neurons, which are sometimes overblown in the popular press, see Gallese et al., 2011; Hickok, 2014.)

Imitation is widespread in other species. Chimpanzees observe and imitate all sorts of novel foraging and tool use behaviors, which are then transmitted from generation to generation within their local culture (Hopper et al., 2008; Whiten et al., 2007). So, too, with monkeys. Researchers trained groups of vervet monkeys to prefer either blue or pink corn by soaking one color in a disgusting-tasting solution (van de Waal et al., 2013). Four to six months later, after a new generation of monkeys was born, the adults stuck with whatever color they had learned to prefer—and, on observing them, so did all but one of 27 infant monkeys. Moreover, when blue- (or pink-) preferring males migrated to the other group, they switched preferences and began eating as the other group did. Monkey see, monkey do.

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In humans, imitation is pervasive. Our catchphrases, fashions, ceremonies, foods, traditions, morals, and fads all spread by one person copying another. Children and even infants are natural imitators (Marshall & Meltzoff, 2014). Shortly after birth, babies may imitate adults who stick out their tongue. By 8 to 16 months, infants imitate various novel gestures (Jones, 2007). By 12 months (FIGURE 21.5), they look where an adult is looking (Meltzoff et al., 2009). And by 14 months, children imitate acts modeled on TV (Meltzoff, 1988; Meltzoff & Moore, 1989, 1997). Even as 2½-year-olds, when many of their mental abilities are near those of adult chimpanzees, young humans surpass chimps at social tasks such as imitating another’s solution to a problem (Herrmann et al., 2007). Children see, children do.

So strong is the human predisposition to learn from watching adults that 2- to 5-year-old children overimitate. Whether living in urban Australia or rural Africa, they copy even irrelevant adult actions. Before reaching for a toy in a plastic jar, they will first stroke the jar with a feather if that’s what they have observed (Lyons et al., 2007). Or, imitating an adult, they will wave a stick over a box and then use the stick to push on a knob that opens the box—when all they needed to do to open the box was to push on the knob (Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010).

Humans, like monkeys, have brains that support empathy and imitation. Researchers cannot insert experimental electrodes in human brains, but they can use fMRI scans to see brain activity associated with performing and with observing actions. So, is the human capacity to simulate another’s action and to share in another’s experience due to specialized mirror neurons? Or is it due to distributed brain networks? That issue is currently being debated (Gallese et al., 2011; Iacoboni, 2008, 2009; Mukamel et al., 2010; Spaulding, 2013). Regardless, children’s brains do enable their empathy and their ability to infer another’s mental state, an ability known as theory of mind.

The brain’s response to observing others makes emotions contagious. Through its neurological echo, our brain simulates and vicariously experiences what we observe. So real are these mental instant replays that we may misremember an action we have observed as an action we have performed (Lindner et al., 2010). But through these reenactments, we grasp others’ states of mind. Observing others’ postures, faces, voices, and writing styles, we unconsciously synchronize our own to theirs—which helps us feel what they are feeling (Bernieri et al., 1994; Ireland & Pennebaker, 2010). We find ourselves yawning when they yawn, laughing when they laugh.

Seeing a loved one’s pain, our faces mirror the other’s emotion. But as FIGURE 21.6 shows, so do our brains. In this fMRI scan, the pain imagined by an empathic romantic partner triggered some of the same brain activity experienced by the loved one who actually had the pain (Singer et al., 2004). Even fiction reading may trigger such activity, as we mentally simulate (and vicariously experience) the feelings and actions described (Mar & Oatley, 2008; Speer et al., 2009). In one experiment, university students read (and vicariously experienced) a fictional fellow student’s description of overcoming obstacles to vote. A week later, those who read the first-person account were more likely to vote in a presidential primary election (Kaufman & Libby, 2012). In experiments with elementary, high school, and college students, reading Harry Potter has reduced prejudice against immigrants, refugees, and gay people (Vezzali et al., 2015). The prejudice reduction is greatest for readers who identify with Harry and his acceptance of stigmatized people such as the “Mudbloods.”

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21-4 What is the impact of prosocial modeling and of antisocial modeling?

So the big news from Bandura’s studies and the mirror-neuron research is that we look, we mentally imitate, and we learn. Models—in our family, our neighborhood, or the media we consume—may have effects, good and bad.

PROSOCIAL EFFECTS The good news is that prosocial (positive, helpful) models can have prosocial effects. Many business organizations effectively use behavior modeling to help new employees learn communication, sales, and customer service skills (Taylor et al., 2005). Trainees gain these skills faster when they are able to observe the skills being modeled effectively by experienced workers (or actors simulating them).

People who exemplify nonviolent, helpful behavior can also prompt similar behavior in others. India’s Mahatma Gandhi and America’s Martin Luther King, Jr., both drew on the power of modeling, making nonviolent action a powerful force for social change in both countries. The media offer models. For example, one research team found that across seven countries, viewing prosocial TV, movies, and video games boosted later helping behavior (Prot et al., 2014).

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Parents are also powerful models. European Christians who risked their lives to rescue Jews from the Nazis usually had a close relationship with at least one parent who modeled a strong moral or humanitarian concern; this was also true for U.S. civil rights activists in the 1960s (London, 1970; Oliner & Oliner, 1988). The observational learning of morality begins early. Socially responsive toddlers who readily imitated their parents tended to become preschoolers with a strong internalized conscience (Forman et al., 2004).

Models are most effective when their actions and words are consistent. Sometimes, however, models say one thing and do another. To encourage children to read, read to them and surround them with books and people who read. To increase the odds that your children will practice your religion, worship and attend religious activities with them. Many parents seem to operate according to the principle “Do as I say, not as I do.” Experiments suggest that children learn to do both (Rice & Grusec, 1975; Rushton, 1975). Exposed to a hypocrite, they tend to imitate the hypocrisy—by doing what the model did and saying what the model said.

ANTISOCIAL EFFECTS The bad news is that observational learning may also have antisocial effects. This helps us understand why abusive parents might have aggressive children, and why many men who beat their wives had wife-battering fathers (Stith et al., 2000). Critics note that aggressiveness could be genetic. But with monkeys, we know it can be environmental. In study after study, young monkeys separated from their mothers and subjected to high levels of aggression grew up to be aggressive themselves (Chamove, 1980). The lessons we learn as children are not easily replaced as adults, and they are sometimes visited on future generations.

TV shows, movies, and online videos are sources of observational learning. While watching, children may learn that bullying is an effective way to control others, that free and easy sex brings pleasure without later misery or disease, or that men should be tough and women gentle. And they have ample time to learn such lessons. During their first 18 years, most children in developed countries spend more time watching TV than they spend in school. The average teen averages, across 365 days a year, more than 4 hours a day; the average adult, 3 hours (Robinson & Martin, 2009; Strasburger et al., 2010).

Viewers are learning about life from a rather peculiar storyteller, one that reflects the culture’s mythology but not its reality. Between 1998 and 2006, prime-time violence on TV reportedly increased 75 percent (PTC, 2007). The violence numbers escalate with the addition of cable programming and home movie-viewing. An analysis of more than 3000 network and cable programs aired during one closely studied year revealed that nearly 6 in 10 featured violence, that 74 percent of the violence went unpunished, that 58 percent did not show the victims’ pain, that nearly half the incidents involved “justified” violence, and that nearly half involved an attractive perpetrator. These conditions define the recipe for the violence-viewing effect described in many studies (Donnerstein, 1998, 2011). To read more about this effect, see Thinking Critically About: Does Viewing Media Violence Trigger Violent Behavior?

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Bandura’s work—like that of Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, B. F. Skinner, and thousands of others who advanced our knowledge of learning principals—illustrates the impact that can result from single-minded devotion to a few well-defined problems and ideas. These researchers defined the issues and impressed on us the importance of learning. As their legacy demonstrates, intellectual history is often made by people who risk going to extremes in pushing ideas to their limits (Simonton, 2000).