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Evaluation. - Coggle Diagram
Evaluation.
Useful applications:
- The basics of SLT has helped to increase out understanding on criminal behaviour.
Akers 1998.
- Claimed that the your more likely to commit a crime if your model commits a crime and gets away with it.
Ulrich 2003.
- Supports this claim.
- He found that the strongest cause of violence was having troublesome peers.
Motivation!
- Bandura and Walters’ (1963) found that those in the no-reward no-punishment control group were somewhere in between high/low levels of aggression.
- Bandura called this type of learning vicarious learning – the children were learning about the likely consequences of actions and then adjusting their subsequent behaviour accordingly.
The theory does not tell us why a child would be motivated to perform the same behaviours in the absence of the model.
Cultural differences.
- For instance, among the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert, aggression is comparatively rare.
- This is because there is an absence of direct reinforcement of aggressive behaviour as well as the absence of aggressive models.
- This means that there is little opportunity or motivation for !Kung San children to acquire behaviours.
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Unlike OC.
Unlike operant conditioning theory, it can explain aggressive behaviour in the absence of direct reinforcement.
- Although Bandura et al.’s (1963) participants behaved more aggressively after observing an aggressive model, at no point were the children directly rewarded for any action, either aggressive or non-aggressive.
- Consequently, the concept of vicarious learning is necessary to explain these findings.
Ethical issues:
- This is because exposing children to aggressive behaviour with the knowledge that they may reproduce it in their own behaviour raises ethical issues concerning the need to protect participants from psychological and physical harm.
- As a result, experimental studies such as the Bobo doll studies would no longer be allowed to take place.
- This means that it is difficult to test experimental hypotheses about the social learning of aggressive behaviour in children and consequently difficult to establish the scientific credibility of the theory by this means.
Demand characteristics.
- It is possible that the children in the Bobo doll study were aware of what was expected of them aka. demand characteristics.
- Noble (1975) reports that one child said 'Look Mummy, there's the doll we have to hit'.
Philips 1986.
- He found that daily homicide rates in the US almost always increased in the week following a major boxing match.
- This suggests that viewers were imitating behaviour they watched and so social learning is evident in adults as well as children.