SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY These photos document the “Bobo doll” experiments conducted by Albert Bandura and his colleagues at Stanford University in the early 1960s. Seventy-two children from the Stanford University Nursery School were divided into experimental and control groups. The “aggressive condition” experimental group subjects watched an adult in the room sit on, kick, and hit the Bobo doll with hands and a wooden mallet while saying such things as “Sock him in the nose,” “Throw him in the air,” and “Pow.” (In later versions of the experiment, children watched filmed versions of the adult with the Bobo doll.) Afterward, in a separate room filled with toys, the children in the “aggressive condition” group were more likely than the other children to imitate the adult model’s behavior toward the Bobo doll.

Courtesy of Albert Bandura