Albert Bandura led the 1961 Bobo doll experiment on children’s imitation of aggressive behavior.
Bandura, Dorothea Ross, and Sheila Ross studied children at Stanford University. In the experiment, some children watched an adult behave aggressively toward an inflatable Bobo doll, while others saw a nonaggressive adult model or no model. The children were then placed in a room containing toys, including a Bobo doll, and their behavior was observed.
Children who had seen aggressive modeling were more likely to imitate physical and verbal aggression directed at the doll. The results became an important demonstration of observational learning, the idea that people can acquire behavior by watching others rather than through direct reinforcement alone.
The study is often summarized too simply as proving that media violence directly causes real-world violence. Its findings concerned children’s imitative behavior in a controlled setting, and later research has examined many additional influences. The experiment also contributed to Bandura’s broader social learning theory, later called social cognitive theory.