Albert Bandura

Albert Bandura is known for his theory based on media effects.
He looked at the way media can have a direct influence of its audience, and what it can do to their behaviour.
He argues that violence is prevalent (widespread) in a range of media, such as various TV programmes. It can expose violence, enabling us to perceive and believe that violence is an acceptable form of behaviour and a normal way to conduct ourselves in certain situations. He called this the 'modelling' of behaviour.

In 1961, Bandura illustrated the Bobo Doll experiment. It was a way for him to observe the behaviour of children and the way they behave in different ways. He believed that certain people on the media, at school or on TV, can be seen as suitable models to follow, resulting in the imitation of their actions. Children pay attention to some people and encode their behaviour, good or bad. Therefore, he wanted to conduct an experiment to investigate whether certain behaviours (aggression) could be acquired in children based on observation and imitation.

36 boys and 36 girls, aged between 3 to 6 years old were used. 24 of the children watched either a male or female behave aggressively towards a Bobo doll in a distinctive manner-some cases a hammer was used! The other 24 were exposed to a non-aggressive role model, acting with a subdued manner, playing gently. The final 24 were used as a control group, so were not shown to any form of model behaviour at all.

His results concluded that the children observing the most aggression had become the most aggressive back, but the other children had a less aggressive response. Also, he noticed that boys became more physically aggressive than the girls, but both genders had little difference between verbal aggression.