Aggression Flashcards
Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment 1961
Bandura, Ross and Ross conducted a controlled experiment to investigate if aggression can be acquired by observation and imitation. They tested 36 boys and 36 girls aged between three and six. The researchers pre-tested the children for how aggressive they were by observing them and judged their aggressive behaviour on four 5-point rating scales. They then split the children into groups with a range of 5-point scores. They exposed twenty-four children to an adult role model who played aggressively with a bobo doll for ten minutes, half to a male role model and half to a female, twenty-four to a non-aggressive role model who played quietly, ignoring the bobo doll, and a control group of twenty-four who were exposed to no role model. All of the children were then exposed to a ‘mild aggression arousal’ where they were showed a box of toys, but as soon as the child started to play with them, they would be told that those toys were for other children. The children were then left in a room for twenty minutes with a range of toys, including a bobo doll, and the children were observed by the experimenters. Children who observed the aggressive model made far more imitative aggressive responses than those who were in the non-aggressive or control groups. There was more partial and non-imitative aggression among those children who had observed aggressive behaviour, although the difference for non-imitative aggression was small. The girls in the aggressive model condition also showed more physically aggressive responses if the model was male, but more verbally aggressive responses if the model was female. However, the exception to this general pattern was the observation of how often they punched Bobo, and in this case the effects of gender were reversed. Boys were more likely to imitate same-sex models than girls. The evidence for girls imitating same-sex models is not strong. Boys imitated more physically aggressive acts than girls. There was little difference in verbal aggression between boys and girls.
Jacob’s Syndrome
a genetic intersex condition where a male has two Y chromosomes with symptoms such as enhanced growth, and possibly learning disability and aggression, hence there is a disproportionately high amount of people with Jacob’s syndrome in the prison population
