Among the classic tales we tell psychology students every semester is that of the fabled Bobo doll. In the typical story, young children are brought to a psychology laboratory. There, they watch adult actors either beating a Bobo doll (a balloon toy with a weighted bottom that rebounds when hit like a punching bag) or playing calmly and peacefully. Those kids that watch the adult attack the Bobo doll are more likely to swat the Bobo doll themselves when given the chance. Thus, kids learn to be aggressive by watching adult models. And this applies to video games and movies and everything else. At least that’s the story we tell students. But what if it’s all wrong?
Classic psychology studies have taken a beating in recent years. The Stanford Prison experiment is all but dead, due to accusations researchers coached participants on how to behave. The famous Milgram electroshock studies of obedience have come under criticism for validity problems, mainly that findings were driven primarily by participants who knew the experiment was fake. And a study I personally loved, the Rosenhan study of psychiatric hospitals that wouldn’t let students who faked a mental illness go once they returned to normal behavior, has been accused of basically being fraudulent.
Nobody’s accusing Bandura of fraud by any means. But these origin stories of modern psychology generally aren’t faring well, so I’m less willing to take any of them at face value. And they are often taught to students as powerful exemplars of psychology’s wonderfulness. Often, students aren’t told of these studies’ major limitations or controversies over their validity. That’s marketing, not education.
With that in mind, I propose this controversial observation: The Bobo doll studies aren’t aggression studies at all, and because of this, they likely impeded rather than informed our knowledge of aggression.
The methods of the Bobo doll studies have actually been criticized for decades. Indeed, as one 1996 evaluation put it, “The Bobo modeling paradigm may not examine aggression at all, rather, imitative behavior of ‘rough and tumble play’ in which there is no intent to harm.” They are absolutely right, and this is something we need to teach students. In fact, even this synopsis may be generous.
The Bobo doll studies were useful as a scientific demonstration of imitative learning. Granted, most people in the general public probably were aware kids imitated, but psychology at the time was mired in Operant Conditioning Theory which required direct rewards and punishments to learn. Operant conditioning happens, of course (just as classical conditioning, the pairing of two stimuli together, also happens) but it doesn’t explain all or perhaps even most human learning. The Bobo doll studies showed that kids can learn through imitation without being directly reinforced.
But why did they learn and what did they learn, exactly? The Bobo doll studies were often perceived as demonstrating that aggression was learned and that this could possibly apply to things like movie violence and violent crime. It turns out this was a terrible wrong turn for psychology and the idea that movie or video game violence contributes to real-world aggression is now largely in decline, probably part of psychology’s replication crisis. How did the Bobo doll studies result in such a gross misunderstanding of aggression?
Well, the Bobo doll studies aren’t studies of aggression at all. They’re simply studies on how kids follow directions. Basically, kids were brought into the laboratory and forced to watch adults play. Given no other instructions, the kids probably just thought that whatever the adults did were instructions for what they should do next. In other words, they weren’t motivated to be aggressive, they were just doing whatever they thought would make the adults happy.
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The Bobo doll studies are a bit weird in some other aspects. First, often omitted from the story, the kids were purposefully frustrated at one point by being shown a bunch of toys they weren’t allowed to play with. Why would this even be necessary if imitation is so automatic? A follow-up 1963 study showed that kids only imitated aggression when the adult actor was rewarded and were less likely to behave aggressively when the model was punished even when the model was punished with aggressive behavior himself! So even young kids don’t just imitate aggressive behavior but understand the context in which it occurs.
The other obvious problem with the Bobo doll studies is the Bobo doll itself. It’s a toy that is entirely intended to be hit. Hitting a Bobo doll tells us nothing about physical aggression toward other people in the real world. The sample sizes of the studies were also pretty small, so we’ve banked a huge amount of our understanding of aggression on some fairly small and obviously flawed studies.
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Given the spectacular flame-out of other “classic” psychology studies, I’d be curious to see the raw data and notes from the Bandura studies. I actually emailed Bandura and his personal assistant several times inquiring if such data existed. Unfortunately, I did not receive a reply. Granted, that data would be 60 years old at this point, so it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s just gone after all this time. But, to be frank, I’m no longer confident of the integrity of these old studies given the “wild west” standards of psychology in which they were developed (and which too often remains true to this day).
None of this is to say that imitative learning plays no role in aggression. But it’s probably far less than we thought, mainly due to these flawed Bobo doll studies. Behavioral genetics studies of aggression suggest that “shared” environmental factors, which would be a prime grounds for imitative learning, tend to have very weak value in predicting aggression. Causes of aggressive behavior are complex, including genetic, mental health, stress, and other social inputs. But it appears that, in large part because of the bobo doll studies, psychology put too much emphasis on imitative learning, leading to entirely wrong paths such as beliefs in media violence effects.
So why do we keep teaching students about such a flawed study, particularly in a way that appears to reify it as some kind of sacrosanct holy writ? Here again, the reasons are myriad. Probably, it’s just a great story, like the many rubbish but cool stories we tell students. These misleading fantasy tales include the parable of the witnesses who didn’t intervene in the murder of Kitty Genovese (a story largely made up), or that Phineas Gage’s personality changed dramatically after a metal rod pierced his skull (Gage’s personality changes have been at least somewhat exaggerated). In a sense, we use stories like the Bobo doll experiment to show students how “cool” psychology can be. Unfortunately, in our efforts to market our field, sometimes truth and critical thinking get lost along the way.
It’s probably time to retire the Bobo doll studies as an exemplar of psychological research. At best, they show that kids look to adults for instructions, something people largely already knew. At worst, the grossly misinformed us about how aggression develops. And we should be honest with students about that.
