The Bandura Bobo Doll Experiment [MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: Watson had shown that emotions are learned and Harlow that we are intensely social creatures? So it was natural to put these two ideas together and ask, how much of what we do and feel is learned from other people? In 1961, American psychologist Albert Bandura set out to see how far just watching other people influences our behavior. [MUSIC PLAYING] Bandura chose to study aggression. At the time, the widespread view was that watching violence reduces aggression. It purges us. But was this true? [MUSIC PLAYING] To find out, Bandura experimented on small children aged three to five. What Bandura did is he put an adult in a room with a child and a bunch of toys, including something he called, the Bobo doll, which is a giant inflatable doll. Then what happened after about a minute, the adult unexpectedly started beating up the doll in really quite vicious manner shouting, screaming, kicking, hitting with a hammer, and went on like this for about 10 minutes. What would the child do if after watching the adult, they were left in a room on their own with the same toys? [MUSIC PLAYING] Oo! She really is going for it. She's doing exactly the same as she saw the adult do. She's lifted the doll up and now she's really hammering it. She's got a little hammer out and she's having a go at this [INAUDIBLE]. It shows innovation if nothing else. Every child who walks the adult being violent copied much of what they'd seen. The closest imitation was when a child observed an adult with the same sex. Now we've got the gun out and he's using that. A combination of the gun and the hammer to just whack the doll. He's got a very aggressive expression on his face. Importantly, another group who would watch an adult play gently played calmly, showing no signs of aggression. Basically, what the children saw the children did. This was an utterly unexpected finding. Before Bandura did this experiment, psychologists thought that seeing somebody else acting out a violent scene would be cathartic. It would sort of purge you. But what these clearly demonstrated and really shocked people at the time is that actually what happens when you see something doing violent actions, you tend to imitate them. Bandura's findings were given added impact by his timing. His experiment took place just as television was moving into the home. Two years later, Bandura reran his experiment with one important difference. This time he wanted to compare how children react to watching an aggressive adult, not in real life but on film. Children watched two versions. One was a straightforward recording of the adult beating up the Bobo doll. The second, a fantasy version with the attacking adult dressed as a cat. In almost every case, Bandura got the same results. Children imitated what they'd seen. The results were dynamite. This was one of the first experiments to look at the impact of television violence. The complicated relationship between TV and behavior is still being debated. But it was Bandura who opened the floodgates and launched an entirely new area of research. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHILD: Right. MAN: Right. OK, [INAUDIBLE]. NARRATOR: Bandura had shown that we can be strongly influenced by other people's behavior. This is the basis of so-called social learning theory. - We don't have a bowl. MAN: OK, so-- CHILD: How much? MAN: Measure about 4 ounces, I think. CHILD: Which one's ounces? NARRATOR: But it's also clear that how we learn changes as we mature. As we grow up something else happens to temper our behavior. We develop a capacity to reflect on what we see. MAN: We spray it on the edge. NARRATOR: We identify with other people. We develop empathy. CHILD: Mm. Tastes good. MAN: It's good isn't it?