Section B: Paradigm analysis
Which perspective, and what it assumes
Which perspective does the study mainly represent?
The short answer: behavioural, in its social learning form, at the point where it starts to turn cognitive. The study also has a strong social element, because the cause it tests is another person's example.
The outline asks you to choose one perspective, so you need a reason for your choice. Here is the evidence for each candidate, taken from the study itself.
| Perspective | What in the study fits it | What does not fit |
|---|---|---|
| Behavioural | Aggression is measured only as observable acts, counted every five seconds. The environment is controlled and changed by the experimenter. The explanation is learning, not instinct. | Strict behaviourism says learning needs reinforcement. Here no one was rewarded, so the study argues against the strict version. |
| Social | The cause being tested is another person: the adult model. The sex of the model and of the child matter to the predictions. | The study looks at one child and one adult at a time. It does not study groups, norms or real relationships. |
| Cognitive | To copy acts minutes later in another room, the child must have stored a memory of them. Later work by Bandura made this mental storage central. | The 1961 paper does not measure thinking, attention or memory. It only infers them. |
Most textbooks place the study under learning or behavioural approaches, and Hock includes it in a chapter on conditioning and learning. If you choose "social", that is defensible too, as long as you say that social learning theory began inside behaviourism. The strongest answer names the tension: the study uses behavioural methods to show something the strict behavioural theory could not explain.
Why not call it simply 'social psychology'?
Social psychology as a field studies how people affect each other: conformity, obedience, groups, attitudes. Social learning theory is a theory of learning that gives other people a central role. The Bobo doll study belongs to both histories, but its questions and methods come from learning theory.
What the research assumes
Every study rests on beliefs that it does not test. These are its assumptions. The outline asks about five.
Human nature
The study treats children as shaped mainly by their environment, and especially by the people around them. Aggression is not treated as an inner drive that must come out. It is treated as behaviour that is picked up from models. At the same time, the child is not a passive object. The child watches, stores what was seen, and reproduces it later. This view is more active than strict behaviourism, but it still places the main cause outside the child.
There is also an assumption about boys and girls. The paper treats aggression as "masculine-typed" and expects boys to copy it more. It takes society's gender roles of the time as a given starting point, not as something to question.
Knowledge
The study assumes that we gain reliable knowledge by controlled observation and measurement. Trained observers behind a one-way mirror count defined acts in five-second intervals. What the children thought or felt is not asked. This is the stance called positivism: the belief that science should study what can be observed and measured, and that good methods remove the observer's personal view.
Truth
The study assumes that there is one general truth to discover about how children learn aggression, and that it applies beyond the 72 children in the room. A careful experiment in one nursery school is taken to reveal a general law of learning. Truth here is universal, causal and stable. It does not depend on culture, history or the meaning that the situation had for the children.
Change
The study assumes that behaviour changes when the environment changes. If watching aggression adds aggression, then changing what children watch should change what they do. This is an optimistic and practical assumption. It points towards prevention: better models, less exposure to violence. It also explains why the study became so important in arguments about television.
Behaviour
Behaviour is assumed to be the specific acts that can be counted: punches, kicks, phrases. Hitting a Bobo doll is treated as aggression. The study does not ask whether the children saw it as aggression, as play, or as doing what the grown-ups seemed to want. Behaviour is separated from its meaning for the person doing it. Several of the lenses in Section C focus on exactly this point.
Try this
A classmate says: 'The study cannot be behavioural, because Bandura showed that reinforcement was not needed.'
Is your classmate right? How would you answer?
Show the reasoning
Partly right, but the conclusion does not follow. The study rejects one behavioural claim: that new behaviour can only be learned through reinforcement. It keeps the rest of the behavioural approach. It defines aggression as observable acts, measures it by counting, controls the environment, and explains the result through learning from the environment.
A good answer is that the study comes from inside behaviourism and pushes it to change. That is why it is usually placed with behavioural approaches, while also being seen as a step towards the cognitive view.