Observational Learning

A further form of learning takes place simply by observing others, without any direct reinforcement of the observer's own behaviour. This was earlier called imitation, but Albert Bandura and his colleagues investigated it in detail through a series of experimental studies and showed it to be a distinct process, often called social learning because it is central to how human beings acquire social behaviour; the process of observing and then reproducing another's behaviour is called modeling.

Bandura's best-known demonstration used a five-minute film shown to groups of children. In the film, a large room contains numerous toys, including a large "Bobo" doll. A grown-up model enters, looks around, and then behaves aggressively toward the toys and the doll in particular — hitting it, throwing it to the floor, kicking it, and sitting on it. The film had three versions: in one, a group of children saw the model being rewarded and praised by an adult for this aggressive behaviour; in a second, another group saw the model being punished for it; and in a third, a group saw neither reward nor punishment follow the model's behaviour. After watching their assigned version, all three groups of children were placed, one at a time, in a room containing toys similar to those in the film and secretly observed. Children who had seen the aggressive model rewarded were the most aggressive themselves; those who had seen the model punished were the least aggressive. This shows that in observational learning, observers acquire knowledge simply by watching a model's behaviour, but whether they actually display (perform) that behaviour depends on whether the model's behaviour was seen to be rewarded or punished — a distinction, once again, between learning and performance. …