Poster #198 - Bobo Revisited: Children’s Imitation from Aggressive Film Models

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

Integrative Statement

Bandura’s Bobo doll studies are considered classics in the field of psychology. In a previous study in our lab, we have discovered that children in the US today do not imitate aggressive actions on Bobo as they did 50 years ago. We further conducted several different studies to examine possible reasons for this reduced imitation. Here we report two of these studies, which investigated children’s imitation from aggressive film models. The basic Bobo doll paradigm was followed in both studies. Children in the film condition first saw a film with an adult aggressing a blow-up toy (a Bobo doll in Study 1, and a punching bag is Study 2) in novel ways, while children in the control condition received no exposure. We later observed children in free-play with the blow-up and other toys and coded the frequency with which they aggressed in ways shown (imitative aggression) or not shown (non-imitative aggression) by the model. Study 1 was designed as a close replication of Bandura, Ross and Ross (1963) and included a control (n = 18) and film condition (n = 18). To our surprise, the results showed no differences in imitative aggression between the film (M = 0.95) and control condition (M = 0.92). In Study 2, we investigated if children would imitate when presented with enhanced aggression eliciting stimuli. We therefore replaced the Bobo doll with an object more clearly intended for hitting in the modern context (i.e., a punching bag). To address the possibility that the aggressive models in our previous studies appeared as if they weren’t enjoying themselves as much as models in the 1960s, the film model in this study also expressed more enjoyment. In addition, given recent research indicating that parental spanking has declined dramatically over the last decades (thus documenting one important cultural change since the earlier studies, see Ryan et al., 2016), we examined the connection between spanking and children’s in-lab aggression. Thus, we also had parents complete a spanking questionnaire. Forty-eight 3- to 5-year-old children (half girls) were randomly assigned to the film or control condition. We found that children in the film condition engaged in significantly more imitative aggression (M = 3.23) than control children (M = 0.14): U = 366, p = .023, Cohen’s d = 0.48. Spanking frequency and the imitative aggression of children in the film condition were marginally correlated, as indicated by a Spearman correlation (r = .32, p = .067, one-tailed). Results of Study 2 suggest that children imitate more from an aggressive film model when the object is an appropriate one on which to aggress, and the model appears to be having fun. Nonetheless, the level of aggression we saw, and the number of children who imitated was still much lower than reported in Bandura’s studies. Taken together, results from both studies document a shift in children’s imitative aggression, which we propose can be best explained by societal changes between the 1960s and today (i.e., a decline in enactment and acceptance of aggression).

Authors

• Dermina Vasc, University of Virginia
  Presenting Author

• Eve Richey, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author

• Megan J. Heise, University of California, Davis
  Non-Presenting Author

• Angeline Lillard, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author