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The NBA greats that Gie-Ming studied served as models, demonstrating behaviors that could be observed and imitated. We call this process observational learning, as it results from watching the behavior of others. According to Bandura (1986), this type of learning is more likely to occur when the learner: (1) is paying attention to the model; (2) remembers what she observed (Bahrick, Gogate, & Ruiz, 2002); (3) is capable of performing the behavior she has observed; and (4) is motivated to demonstrate the behavior.

Think about how observational learning impacts your own life. Speaking English, eating with utensils, and driving a car are all skills you probably picked up in part by watching and mimicking others. Do you ever use slang? Phrases like “gnarley” (cool) from the 1980s, “Wassup” (What is going on?) from the 1990s, and “peeps” (my people, or friends) from the 2000s caught on because people copy what they observe others saying and writing. Consider some of the phrases trending today that 20 years from now people won’t recognize.

Observational learning doesn’t necessarily require sight. Let’s return to Ivonne, who competes in triathlons, consisting of 1 mile of swimming, 25 miles of biking, and 6 miles of running. Ivonne performs the swimming and running sections of the triathlon attached to a guide with a tether, and the bike section on a tandem bike with the guide. To fine-tune her swimming technique, she feels her swim coach demonstrate the freestyle stroke. Standing in the water behind him, Ivonne places one hand on his back and the other on his arm while he goes through the motions of a stroke. She feels the angle of his arms as they break the water’s surface, the distance between his fingers as he plows through the water, and the position of his wrist throughout the motion. Then she imitates the movement she observed through her sense of touch.

LO 14 Summarize what Bandura’s classic Bobo doll study teaches us about learning.

PLEASE PLAY NICELY WITH YOUR DOLL Just as observational learning can lead to positive outcomes like sharper basketball and swimming skills, it can also breed undesirable behaviors. The classic Bobo doll experiment conducted by psychologist Albert Bandura and his colleagues revealed just how fast children can adopt aggressive ways they see modeled by adults, as well as exhibit their own novel aggressive responses (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1961). In one of Bandura’s studies, 76 preschool children were placed in a room alone with an adult and allowed to play with stickers and prints for making pictures. During their playtime, some of the children were paired with adults who acted aggressively toward a 5-foot-tall inflatable Bobo doll—punching it in the nose, hitting its head with a mallet, kicking it around the room, and yelling phrases such as, “Sock him in the nose” and “Pow!” The other children in the study were paired with adults who played with toys peacefully (Bandura et al., 1961).

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At the end of the experiment, all the children were allowed to play with a Bobo doll themselves. Those who had observed adults attacking and shouting were much more likely to do the same. Boys were more likely than girls to mimic physical aggression, especially if they had observed it modeled by men. Boys and girls were about equally likely to imitate verbal aggression (Bandura et al., 1961).

VIOLENCE IN THE MEDIA Psychologists have followed up Bandura’s research with studies investigating how children are influenced by violence they see on television, the Internet, and in movies and video games. The American Academy of Pediatrics sums it up nicely: “Extensive research evidence indicates that media violence can contribute to aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, nightmares, and fear of being harmed” (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2009, p. 1495). One large study found that children who watched TV programs with violent role models, such as Starsky and Hutch (a detective series from the 1970s that included violence and suspense), were at increased risk when they became adults of physically abusing their spouses and getting into trouble with the law (Huesmann, Moise-Titus, Podolski, & Eron, 2003). A more recent study conducted in New Zealand followed over 1,000 children from as early as birth until they were around 26 years old. The researchers found that the more television the children watched, the more likely they were to show antisocial behaviors as young adults. Interestingly, this association was between antisocial behaviors and excessive television viewing, regardless of the content (Robertson, McAnally, & Hancox, 2013).

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Critics caution, however, that an association between media portrayals and violent behaviors doesn’t mean there is a cause-and-effect relationship (establishing an association is not the same as pinning down a cause). There are other factors related to parenting that could influence both television viewing and aggression (Huesmann et al., 2003). If a parent is emotionally neglectful and places a child in front of the television all day, the child may eventually imitate some of the aggression she sees on TV. At the same time, the child may resent the parent for ignoring her, and this resentment could lead to aggression. But how do you know which of these factors—television exposure or parenting approach—is more important in the development of aggressive tendencies? This is an active area of psychological research, but experts agree that television and other forms of media may influence aggressive tendencies in children (Clemente, Espinosa, & Vidal, 2008; Office of the Surgeon General, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, National Institute of Mental Health, & Center for Mental Health Services, 2001). The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that children should be limited to less than 1–2 hours of total screen time per day (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2001, 2013). Unfortunately, children and their parents have not followed this recommendation. In fact, the average screen time for preschool-age children in the United States has been reported to be as much as 4 hours a day (Tandon, Zhou, Lozano, & Christakis, 2011). Instead of focusing on the number of hours children watch television, some have suggested that we should focus on program content, encouraging families and caregivers to reduce exposure to programs that contain violence and aggression, and to increase the amount of content with prosocial behavior (Christakis et al., 2013; McCarthy, 2013).

PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR AND OBSERVATIONAL LEARNING Here’s the flip side to this issue: Children also have a gift for mimicking positive behaviors. When children watch shows similar to Sesame Street, they receive messages that encourage prosocial behaviors, meaning these programs foster kindness, generosity, and forms of behavior that benefit others.

Let’s look more closely at research on the impact of prosocial models. Using scales to measure children’s stereotypes and cultural knowledge before and after they watch TV shows, a group of researchers found evidence that shows like Sesame Street can have a positive influence (Cole, Labin, & del Rocio Galarza, 2008). Based on their review of multiple studies, these researchers made recommendations to increase prosocial behaviors. Children’s shows should have intended messages, include prosocial information about people of other cultures and religions, be relevant to children in terms of culture and environment, and be age-appropriate and contain intentional and direct (unhidden) messages aimed at educating children about people from different backgrounds.

Adults can also pick up prosocial messages from media. In a multipart study, researchers exposed adults to prosocial song lyrics (as opposed to neutral lyrics). The first experiment found that listening to prosocial lyrics increased the frequency of prosocial thoughts. Findings from the second experiment indicated that listening to a song with prosocial lyrics increased empathy, or the ability to understand what another person is going through. The third experiment found that listening to a song with prosocial lyrics increased helping behavior. These researchers only looked at the short-term effects, but exposing people continuously to prosocial lyrics may have a lasting impact (Greitemeyer, 2009).

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When learning occurs through observation, often it is visible. Children watching aggression toward a Bobo doll imitate the behaviors they see, which researchers can witness and document. Not all forms of learning are so obvious.

LO 15 Describe latent learning and explain how cognition is involved in learning.

Ivonne’s feet pound the streets of Boston. She is among some 20,000 runners competing in the city’s oldest annual 26.2-mile running race, the Boston Marathon. (Ivonne has nabbed first place in the Women’s Visually Impaired Division three times.) She runs with teammates who make sure the path is clear, allowing her to focus on her performance instead of worrying about obstacles.

A MAP THAT CANNOT BE SEEN Before a race, Ivonne checks online to see if there is a description of the course or studies a map with her husband or a friend in order to learn the location of important landmarks such as hills, major turns, bridges, railroad tracks, and so on. “Doing this helps me feel that I have an idea of what to expect, and when to expect it,” Ivonne says. The mental layout she creates contributes to her cognitive map, a mental representation of the physical surroundings, and it continues to come together in the race. As Ivonne runs, she hears sounds from all directions—the breathing of other runners, their feet hitting the ground, chatter from the sidelines—and uses these auditory cues to produce a mental map of her surroundings. In fact, we all create these cognitive maps, which provide a spatial representation to help us navigate our environment. These maps are developed through latent learning, a type of learning that occurs without awareness and regardless of reinforcement, and that remains hidden until there is a need to use it.

RATS THAT KNOW WHERE TO GO Edward Tolman and his colleague C. H. Honzik demonstrated latent learning in rats in their classic 1930 maze experiment (Figure 5.5, below). The researchers took three groups of rats and let them run free in mazes for several days. One group received food for reaching the goal boxes in their mazes; a second group received no reinforcement; and a third received nothing until the 11th day of the experiment, when they, too, received food for finding the goal box. As you might expect, rats getting the treats from the onset solved the mazes more quickly as the days wore on. Meanwhile, their unrewarded compatriots wandered through the twists and turns, showing only minor improvements from one day to the next. But on Day 11 when the researchers started to give treats to the third group of rats, their behavior changed markedly. After just one round of treats, the rats were scurrying through the mazes and scooping up the food as if they had been rewarded throughout the experiment (Tolman & Honzik, 1930). They had apparently been learning, even when there was no reinforcement for doing so—or in simpler terms, learning just for the sake of learning.

We all do this as we acquire cognitive maps of our environments. Without realizing it, we remember locations, objects, and details of our surroundings, and bring this information together in a mental layout (Lynch, 2002). Research suggests that visually impaired people forge cognitive maps without the use of visual information. Instead, they use “compensatory sensorial channels” (hearing and sense of touch, for example) to gather information about their environments (Lahav & Mioduser, 2008).

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This line of research highlights the importance of cognitive processes underlying behavior and suggests that learning can occur in the absence of reinforcement. Because of the focus on cognition, this research approach conflicts with the views of Skinner and some other 20th-century psychologists who adhered to a strict form of behaviorism.

Many other studies have challenged Skinner’s views. Wolfgang Köhler’s (1925) research on chimpanzees suggests that animals are capable of thinking through a problem before taking action. He designed an experiment in which chimps were presented with out-of-reach bananas, and showed that the animals were able to plan a variety of banana-fetching strategies, including stacking crates to climb on. Here, the chimps displayed insight, a sudden coming together of awareness of a situation, leading to the solution of a problem (Chapter 7).

Today, most psychologists agree that both observable, measurable behaviors and internal cognitive processes such as insight are necessary and complementary elements of learning. Environmental factors have a powerful influence on behavior, as Pavlov, Skinner, and others discovered, but every action can be traced to activity in the brain. Understanding how cognitive processes translate to behaviors remains one of the great challenges facing psychologists.

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Question 1

1. observational learning.

2. association.

3. prosocial behavior.

4. your cognitive map.

Question 2

Question 3

1. positive reinforcement

2. negative reinforcement.

3. latent learning.

4. stimulus generalization.