Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory is a theory that states cognitive determinism describes how behaviour is learnt through listening, watching, touching, and so forth. He also describes how internal symbolic representation process and remember information. Moreover, to further his theory Bandura is interested in the connection between children and aggressive behavior through modelling. Bandura knows that learning can be learnt through cognitive determinism, but what he wants to know is the extent that children learn through observation of adult behaviour. Instead of inheriting violent actions children can observe and imitate aggressive behaviours. Bandura believes that aggressive behaviour in children is influenced by models and media. As a result colleagues of Bandura and Bandura himself created the experiment: “The Bobo Doll Experiment”. Bandura’s hypothesis is the connection between aggressive modeling and aggressive behaviour in children, fitting with his views on social learning.
Hypothesis:
A hypothesis is a further way of stating a question (Galenza, 2013). Moreover, a hypothesis is the relationship between variables and predictions on what the answer to the question is going to result in. Bandura has more than one prediction in the “Bobo Doll Experiment”. He had four predictions: he predicted that children who were exposed to model aggressive behaviour would imitate that same aggression when the model was no longer present, he predicted that children who were exposed to a non-aggressive environment would imitate aggressive behaviour when the model was no longer present, he predicted that children would most likely imitate models of same sex instead of opposite sex, and his final prediction was boys would behave more aggressive than girls would (Cherry, 2013). In order to answer his predictions Bandura needed to perform an experiment.