Poster #199 - Imitative Aggression in Romanian Children: A Cross-Cultural Replication of the Bobo Doll Experiment

• In Event: 1-115 - Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

In recent studies in our lab, we have discovered that, unlike 50 years ago, American children today rarely imitate aggressive acts in Bandura’s famous Bobo doll experiment. On the theory that cultural change might explain this shift in children’s behavior, we further conducted several studies examining how different factors impact imitation. One such factor is parental spanking, correlated and even causally linked with increased aggressive behaviors in young children (see Gershoff et al., 2016). In the last decades, parental spanking in the US has however substantially declined (Ryan et al., 2016), indicating one possible cultural difference between the 1960s and today. In the current study, we conducted a replication of the Bobo doll experiment (i.e., Bandura et al., 1963) in Romania to investigate whether children imitate aggression more in a culture where spanking children is endorsed more. In addition, this study was carried at children’s schools, thus eliminating one other difference between Bandura’s studies, conducted in schools, and our US studies, run in the lab. Thirty-eight 3- to 5-year-old children were randomly distributed to the film (n = 19, 9 girls) and control condition (n = 19, 9 girls) and tested individually. Their parents also completed a questionnaire (Lansford et al., 2005) measuring spanking rates and attitudes. Children in the film condition drew while watching a 5-minute film with an adult aggressing on a Bobo doll in novel ways (e.g., hitting the Bobo doll with a mallet), while control children just drew for 5 minutes. Immediately after, children were observed during 10 minutes of free play with the Bobo doll and other distractor toys. Just as Bandura et al. (1963), we later coded the frequency with which children imitated the novel aggressive acts displayed by the model (imitative or partial imitative aggression) or aggressed non-imitatively, in ways not displayed by the model (non-imitative aggression). The results showed no differences in imitative aggression between children in the film (M = 0.47, SD = 1.17) and control condition (M = 0.79, SD = 2.30): U = 179, p = .977. No differences were found in the other types of aggression either. Regarding spanking, we found that most children were spanked at home (71%, compared to just 30% of the children in a study carried in the US), and their parents also had less negative views toward spanking than US parents. Moreover, parents’ positive attitudes toward spanking were correlated with children’s total aggression scores during the experiment (r = .34, p =.018, one-tailed Spearman correlation). In conclusion, like children in the US, children in Romania showed very low levels of imitation from aggressive film models. Therefore, merely being in a culture where spanking one's child is endorsed more, and being tested at school where watching a film might be construed as something to learn from, had no clear influence. However, further studies are needed to determine whether children would imitate from other mediums (e.g., live presentations). Finally, our findings do indicate a connection between spanking and children’s in-lab aggression that merits further investigation.

Authors

• Dermina Vasc, University of Virginia
  Presenting Author

• Catrinel Alice Stefan, Department of Psychology, Babes-Bolyai University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Angeline Lillard, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author