The critical lens

The lens in brief

Critical psychology examines psychology itself. It asks how the discipline's methods, questions and findings are shaped by power and by the society they come from, and whose interests they serve. Writers in this tradition include Ian Parker in Britain, Dennis Fox and Isaac Prilleltensky in North America, and Ignacio Martín-Baró in El Salvador. Feminist psychologists have made many of the same arguments about gender.

A central critical claim is that mainstream psychology tends to individualise social problems. It explains suffering or harm as something inside individuals, which draws attention away from social causes such as poverty, inequality, racism and war.

In 1973 Kenneth Gergen added a related point in a paper titled "Social psychology as history". He argued that many findings in social psychology describe a particular time and place, not timeless laws, because people's behaviour changes as their society and their knowledge of psychology change.

How this lens reads the study

Violence becomes a property of children. The study asks how violence gets into a child. That is a useful question, but it is not the only one. In 1961, violence in American society included racial violence in the segregated South, the threat of nuclear war and wars abroad. None of this appears in the study. The critical lens says the experiment shrinks a large social problem to the size of a nursery room: one child, one doll, one model. It then becomes easy to look for solutions at the same small scale, such as controlling what children watch, rather than at the scale of laws, inequality and state violence.

The power to define. The researchers decided what counted as aggression: hitting a toy designed to be hit. The children were not asked whether they were being aggressive or playing. Experts in a university defined the children's behaviour for them, and the label "aggression" travelled into textbooks, courts and parliaments. The critical lens asks who has the power to name other people's behaviour, and with what effects.

Gender as fixed, and girls' aggression unseen. The paper describes aggression as "a highly masculine-typed behavior" and explains the children's choices through "prior learning about what is sex appropriate behavior" (pp. 575, 581). The authors saw these differences as learned, not inborn. But feminist critics point out that the study still treats the gender roles of 1950s America as a fixed background to predict from, rather than as an arrangement of power to examine. The study's design could not ask why boys were expected to be aggressive, who benefited from that expectation, or how girls who broke it were treated. In 1968 Naomi Weisstein made the general feminist point in a paper called "Psychology constructs the female": "psychology has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context".

The measures also shaped what counted. The study recorded hitting, kicking and shouted phrases. Later research by Nicki Crick and Jennifer Grotpeter (1995) on relational aggression, harming someone by damaging their friendships, for example by leaving them out or spreading rumours, argued that the usual finding that boys are more aggressive partly "reflects a lack of research on forms of aggression that are relevant to young females". A Bobo room has no relationships to damage, so this kind of aggression could not appear.

Watching children. Children were observed through a one-way mirror without knowing it, after being deceived and frustrated. The critical lens notices the power relation: adults with institutional authority studying children who could not refuse, understand or reply.

How the study was used. The politics ran in more than one direction. When the US Surgeon General set up a scientific committee on television and violence in 1969, the television networks were allowed to veto proposed members without giving reasons. Paisley (1972) reproduced their replies. ABC, NBC and the broadcasters' trade association each vetoed Albert Bandura. Seven researchers in all were struck off, because their work linked watching televised violence with aggression, and none of them served. So the industry with the most to lose shaped who could speak. From the 1960s onward, the Bobo studies were cited in debates on television and later on video games. Some critics argue that "media violence" became a convenient target. It allowed politicians to act against films and games instead of tackling causes of violence that are harder and more costly to change, such as access to guns or poverty. When the US Supreme Court struck down a California law on violent video games in 2011, the majority found the psychological evidence too weak to justify the law. The critical lens does not say media effects are unreal. It asks why some explanations of violence receive so much attention while others receive little.

What this lens values in the study

The study argues that aggression is learned, not inborn. That is a hopeful claim for critical psychologists, because what is learned through social arrangements can be changed by changing those arrangements. Read this way, the study can support arguments for changing the social environments children grow up in, as well as the programmes they watch.

What it would question

• The claim of neutrality. The study presents its definitions and categories as objective, but they carry the assumptions of its time and place.
• The focus on individuals. It leaves out social, economic and political causes of violence.
• The fixed view of gender, written into the hypotheses.
• The unequal power between researchers and child participants.
• The later political uses of the findings.

Evidence from this tradition

Critical psychology works mostly through analysis of how knowledge is made, rather than through new experiments. The media researcher David Gauntlett's essay "Ten things wrong with the 'effects model'" (1998) names the Bobo doll directly. He argues that such studies tackle social problems "backwards", starting from the media instead of from the lives of people who are violent, and that they rely on artificial situations in which hitting an inanimate object is recorded as violence, just as a murder on television is. Histories of the television debate, such as Paisley's account of the 1969 veto, show how research and politics shaped each other. For the statistical side of the argument, where researchers dispute how large media effects really are, see the Why it matters page.

A study this lens would design

A critical psychologist might use participatory action research, in which the people affected help to plan the research and use its results.

1. Work with parents, teachers and older children in a community where violence is a real concern.
2. Ask them to define what harms children and where it comes from, including the media, but also housing, policing, schools and family stress.
3. Study the community's own priorities, and analyse who benefits from the usual explanations.
4. Use the findings to press for changes the community chooses.

The question shifts from "Does watching violence make children aggressive?" to "What makes this community's children unsafe, and who can change it?"

Try this

A government announces a campaign against violent cartoons, citing the Bobo doll study, in the same year that it cuts funding for community youth centres.

How would a critical psychologist analyse this announcement?

Show the reasoning

They would point out that the study is being used to locate the cause of violence in what children watch, an individual-level cause that is cheap to address. At the same time, a social-level support, youth centres, is being removed. The research is not wrong in itself, but its use here focuses attention on one cause and away from others that cost more to address.

The critical psychologist would ask who benefits from this framing, whether the Bobo evidence supports a claim about serious violence at all, and what the affected community thinks would actually reduce harm. (This government is an invented example.)