Bandura, Ross and Ross - Learned Aggression

The study looks at the learning of aggression by children in a laboratory experiment.

 

Bandura was a behaviorist, believing that behaviour was learned from experience and environment. However, he believed that the basic conditioning processes were too simplistic to explain all human learning.  Therefore, Social Learning Theory was proposed, which provides for additional mechanisms, beyond basic conditioning, through which observational learninig occurs.

 

It should be remembered when reading this study, that according to strict behaviorism, learning only occurs through direct rewards or punishments (operant conditioning) or attachment to an existing stimulus-response system (classical conditioninig).  It is the hypothesis that learning can occur simply through observation which the study sets out to test.