Section D: Cultural and decolonial reflection
Who speaks, who is studied, who is missing
This page follows Section D, part 8, of the outline. Questions of power ask who had the authority to design the study, define its terms and tell its story, and who did not.
Who is speaking?
Three researchers at an elite American university. Albert Bandura was a young professor at Stanford. Dorothea and Sheila Ross were researchers working with him; Dorothea completed her Stanford doctorate in 1962. Bandura and Dorothea Ross were both born in Canada. All three worked at one of the wealthiest research universities in the world, and the study was funded by a US government health research grant.
One author became the voice of the study. Although the paper has three authors, the study is almost always called "Bandura's" Bobo doll study. Bandura became president of the American Psychological Association in 1974, and a 2002 ranking that combined citation counts, textbook mentions and a survey of psychologists placed him fourth among the most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century (Haggbloom et al., 2002). The two women who co-authored the work are rarely named, and the paper does not describe their roles or say who acted as the models or ran the sessions. The historian Margaret Rossiter (1993) named a common pattern in science the Matilda effect: credit for shared work flows to the senior, usually male, researcher while women's contributions fade from view.
Bandura himself was not from the elite. He grew up in a small immigrant farming town in Alberta, Canada, the child of parents from Poland and Ukraine. His later theories stressed that people can shape their own lives. His own position in 1961, however, was inside the institution, with the power to design the study and define its terms.
The vocabulary is the researchers'. The paper decides what counts as "aggression", "imitation" and "sex appropriate behavior". The children's own words appear only as a few illustrative quotes in the discussion.
Who is being studied?
Very young children who could not consent. The 72 children were aged three to five. They could not understand what a psychology experiment is, could not agree to take part in any meaningful sense, and were deceived about what was happening. The paper thanks the nursery school's director and head teacher for their help, but reports nothing about consent from parents.
A narrow, privileged slice of childhood. All the children attended the Stanford University Nursery School. The paper gives no information on their families, class or ethnicity. A university nursery school in the late 1950s is likely to have served mainly families connected to the university. Yet the findings were presented, and are still taught, as facts about children in general.
Children watched without knowing. The children were observed through a one-way mirror and their behaviour reduced to counts in five-second intervals. Power in research includes the power to watch others without being watched.
Whose voices are absent?
| Absent voice | What it might have added |
|---|---|
| The children themselves | What they thought the adults were doing, whether they saw hitting the doll as play, fun, naughtiness or "what the lady wanted" |
| Parents | What models the children already had at home, how the family treats aggression, whether they agreed to their child being frustrated and shown aggression |
| Nursery teachers | Teachers helped rate the children, but their knowledge of each child's everyday behaviour did not shape the questions |
| Working-class, Black, Latino and immigrant families in the US | Childhoods with different exposure to violence, different models and different relations with authority |
| Children outside the West | The majority of the world's children, whose family structures, models and norms differ widely |
| Girls, on their own terms | Girls' aggression was measured with categories built around physical acts more common among boys; forms such as exclusion or social cruelty were not counted |
| The models | Two adults acted out aggression in front of small children. We do not know who they were or how they felt about it |
Why this matters for the study's claims
These points are about evidence as well as ethics. They limit what the study can claim.
- A study that never asked the children what they thought cannot rule out that they were playing or trying to please the adults.
- A study of children from one privileged nursery cannot show that the results apply to all children.
- A study that defines aggression only through acts more typical of boys will, almost by design, find that boys are more aggressive.
Power also shaped what happened to the study afterwards. As the critical lens page describes, the television industry later used its influence to keep Bandura off a government scientific committee. And the study's journey into Indian syllabuses as a universal "classic" is part of what the decolonial lens examines.
Try this
A student writes in her journal: 'The children were only three to five, so it does not matter that they were not asked for their views.'
How would you respond, using the idea of power and representation?
Show the reasoning
Young children cannot give informed consent, but that does not mean their views are useless. Researchers today use age-suitable methods, such as play, puppets, drawings and simple questions, to learn what young children think and to obtain their assent. Even four-year-olds can say whether they thought the lady wanted them to hit the doll, or whether it was a game.
Not asking them was a choice made by the researchers, and it had consequences. It left the meaning of the children's behaviour to be defined entirely by adults. That is exactly what a power-and-representation analysis looks for: whose interpretation counts, and whose is never collected.