Albert Bandura's Theory Of Aggression

There are many different definitions of aggression. Albert Bandura and his associated Dorothea and Sheila Ross researched the theory of whether children are more susceptible to acting aggressively if they see important people like parents or teachers act aggressively. There are three theories to explain why people are aggressive; biologically pre programmed to be aggressive because it is an evolutionary survival mechanism, repeated frustration or specific types of provocation, and that aggression is learned. Bandura in his “Bobo Doll Study” focused on the last theory by researching how children act when presented with an older aggressive person.

Basing his research off of the social learning theory, Bandura conducted the experiment using

Many of the children when exposed to the Bobo doll acted and repeated the same phrases they heard the model say. According to Bandura’s research, boys overall acted more aggressively than girls did. Overall the boys portrayed 270 violent acts while girls only committed 128 acts. In 38.2 instances the boys repeated the same physical behaviors the aggressive model showed, while only 12.7 of the girls did. The numbers were more similar when it came to verbally aggressive phrases; boys imitated the model 17 times and girls 15.7 times. Boys acted more aggressively if the model in their group was a male, while girls were less consistent in following the model's actions based on sex. In the non aggressive conditions, there were less aggressive children, but still more instances than those in the control group. This study had a few strengths and weaknesses. One strength was further separating the children into groups based off of sex. This further exemplifies that boys are more aggressive than girls, and that gender does affect how a child thinks they can behave. Another strength was including verbal aggression and not just showing physical abuse. This showed that girls are less are more willing to say verbally aggressive phrases than physically act

It was wildly thought that aggression is more of a “masculine type [of] behavior,” however, this research shows that girls can be aggressive as well. In Western culture, it is more acceptable for males to be aggressive than females who are thought of to be more fragile and tender. While the group of experimental girls did not produce the same results as the group of boys, they did exhibit aggressive tendencies towards the toys. The study also shows that many children will mostly behave aggressively if someone of the same gender, and of higher importance like parent or teacher does as