Practice with real situations

The boy. He reproduced a novel, specific sequence, the climb, the catchphrase and the elbow drop, that he is unlikely to have invented on his own. This mirrors the logic of the Bobo study, which built its test around unusual acts so that exact copies would point to learning.

The sister's harder pushing could be explained by disinhibition: watching aggression may have lowered her restraint, but she did not copy a new act. The Bobo paper made the same distinction. It argued that general increases in aggression could come from weakened inhibition, while "novel patterns" copied exactly provide "striking evidence for the occurrence of learning by imitation" (p. 580).

It shows that she had learned the model's acts but had not performed them in free play. Learning and performance are different: what a child does depends on motivation and expectations, not only on what she has learned. Bandura tested this directly in 1965 and found that offering incentives largely wiped out the differences between groups.

For the 1961 study, it means the lower scores of girls may partly reflect a reluctance to perform aggression, perhaps because it was seen as unsuitable for girls, rather than less learning. Bandura (1965) suggested exactly this: sex differences may reflect "differences in willingness to exhibit aggressive responses, rather than deficits in learning" (p. 594). Even with incentives, though, girls in his study still reproduced somewhat fewer acts than boys.

They support hypothesis 1: children who saw the aggressive model copied far more than both other groups.

Hypothesis 2 is the harder judgement. The calm-model average (2) is lower than the no-model average (4), which is the direction the hypothesis predicts. But with six children per group, a difference of 2 could easily come from one or two children behaving differently. You would need a significance test before claiming that the calm model reduced aggression, and even then you should look at whether the same pattern appears on other measures. This is exactly the position the 1961 authors were in with the calm male model: a consistent direction, but small groups and weak statistics. The control group is what makes the comparison possible at all.

The behavioural lens focuses on consequences. Being benched is punishment, so the gesture should become less frequent in front of the coach. But it may continue where it is not punished, for example in street cricket with friends, because the discriminative stimuli there signal no punishment. The cricketer's fame and success may also work as vicarious reinforcement, which means learning from seeing someone else rewarded.

The cognitive lens focuses on what the boy has stored and believes. He has a mental representation of the gesture and an expectation of when it is rewarded. He may still have learned it fully but now chooses not to perform it when the coach is present. His interpretation also matters: if he sees the gesture as "what great bowlers do", he may wait to use it later. Both lenses predict reduced performance in front of the coach; they differ in whether the learning has gone.

First, the 1961 study did not use cartoons. Its models were live adults. The 1963 follow-up did include a cartoon model, and children copied it, but the measure was still behaviour towards a doll.

Second, "violent" overstates the measure. Children hit a toy built to be hit, a few minutes after watching. The study says nothing about violence towards people or about long-term change.

Third, "proves" ignores the limits: 72 children from one university nursery, small groups, scoring that was not fully blind, and a laboratory setting. A fair claim would be that young children readily copy aggressive acts they have just watched, including from film, in a laboratory playroom.

In 1961 every child, including the controls, was frustrated before the test, to make aggression more likely. Without this step, your children may show less aggression overall, so lower scores would not necessarily mean the model had a weaker effect.

You could deal with it in two ways. First, compare conditions within your own study rather than comparing raw scores with 1961: the question is still whether the aggressive-model group copies more than the others. Second, cite Bandura's 1965 study, which found clear imitation without any frustration step. You would report the difference from the original procedure honestly, as a limitation on direct comparison.

Not directly. The 1961 study compared one unfamiliar man with one unfamiliar woman. It never tested a familiar older child, so it cannot say how such a model compares. The new result adds something: the status a model has for the child may matter more than the model's age or sex.

This fits the social and cultural lenses. Who counts as an important model depends on the child's daily life, and in households with many older children, cousins and siblings may be the most watched models. The 1961 conclusion about the male model is best read as a finding about two particular adults in one American nursery, not as a general rule.

You can defend "social" if you separate the study's methods from its cause. The methods are behavioural: observable acts, counted in five-second intervals, in a controlled room. But the variable the study manipulates, and the thing it shows to be powerful, is another person: a model whose sex and behaviour change what children do. The children's remarks about how "a lady" should behave show social norms working inside the experiment.

A strong answer also concedes the examiner's point. The paper's hypotheses are written in behaviourist language, about reinforcement histories and habit strength, so the study grew out of behaviourism. The best position is that it uses behavioural methods to study a social cause, and that this is why it is often classed under learning approaches. Showing that you see both sides earns more credit than simply holding your first answer.