Applications of Observational Learning
The big news from Bandura’s studies and mirror-neuron research is that we look, we mentally imitate, and we learn. Models—in our family, our neighborhood, or the media we consume—may have effects, good and bad.
Prosocial Effects
The good news is that people’s modeling of prosocial (positive, helpful) behaviors can have prosocial effects. Many business organizations effectively use behavior modeling to help new employees learn communications, sales, and customer service skills (Taylor et al., 2005). Trainees gain these skills faster when they are able to observe the skills being modeled effectively by experienced workers (or actors simulating them).
People who exemplify nonviolent, helpful behavior can also prompt similar behavior in others. After observing someone helping (assisting a woman with dropped books), people become more helpful, such as by assisting someone who dropped a dollar (Burger et al., 2015). India’s Mahatma Gandhi and America’s Martin Luther King, Jr., both drew on the power of modeling, making nonviolent action a powerful force for social change in both countries (Matsumoto et al., 2015). The media offer models. For example, one research team found that across seven countries, viewing prosocial TV, movies, and video games boosted later helping behavior (Prot et al., 2014).
A model caregiver This girl is learning orphan-nursing skills, as well as compassion, by observing her mentor in this Humane Society program. As the sixteenth-century proverb states, “Example is better than precept.”
Children see, children do? Children who often experience physical punishment tend to display more aggression.
Parents are also powerful models. European Christians who risked their lives to rescue Jews from the Nazis usually had a close relationship with at least one parent who modeled a strong moral or humanitarian concern; this was also true for U.S. civil rights activists in the 1960s (London, 1970; Oliner & Oliner, 1988). The observational learning of morality begins early. Socially responsive toddlers who readily imitate their parents tend to become preschoolers with a strong internalized conscience (Forman et al., 2004).
Models are most effective when their actions and words are consistent. To encourage children to read, read to them and surround them with books and people who read. To increase the odds that your children will practice your religion, worship and attend religious activities with them. Sometimes, however, models say one thing and do another. Many parents seem to operate according to the principle “Do as I say, not as I do.” Experiments suggest that children learn to do both (Rice & Grusec, 1975; Rushton, 1975). Exposed to a hypocrite, they tend to imitate the hypocrisy—by doing what the model did and saying what the model said.
Antisocial Effects
The bad news is that observational learning may also have antisocial effects. This helps us understand why abusive parents might have aggressive children, why children who are lied to become more likely to cheat and lie, and why many men who beat their wives had wife-battering fathers (Hays & Carver, 2014; Stith et al., 2000). Critics note that such aggressiveness could be genetic. But with monkeys, we know it can be environmental. In study after study, young monkeys separated from their mothers and subjected to high levels of aggression grew up to be aggressive themselves (Chamove, 1980). The lessons we learn as children are not easily replaced as adults, and they are sometimes visited on future generations.
TV shows, movies, and online videos are sources of observational learning. While watching, children may learn that bullying is an effective way to control others, that free and easy sex brings pleasure without later misery or disease, or that men should be tough and women gentle. And they have ample time to learn such lessons. During their first 18 years, most children in developed countries spend more time watching TV than they spend in school. The average teen watches more than 4 hours a day; the average adult, 3 hours (Robinson & Martin, 2009; Strasburger et al., 2010).
Viewers are learning about life from a peculiar storyteller, one that reflects the culture’s mythology rather than its reality. Between 1998 and 2006, prime-time violence on TV reportedly increased 75 percent (PTC, 2007). An analysis of more than 3000 network and cable programs aired during one closely studied year revealed that nearly 6 in 10 featured violence, that 74 percent of the violence went unpunished, that 58 percent did not show the victims’ pain, that nearly half the incidents involved “justified” violence, and that nearly half involved an attractive perpetrator. These conditions define the recipe for the violence-viewing effect described in many studies and recognized by a near-consensus of media researchers (Bushman et al., 2015; Donnerstein, 1998, 2011). (See Thinking Critically About: The Effects of Viewing Media Violence.)
In 2012, a well-armed man targeted young children and their teachers in a horrifying mass shooting at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School. Was the American media correct in wondering whether the killer was influenced by the violent video games found stockpiled in his home?
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“ Thirty seconds worth of glorification of a soap bar sells soap. Twenty-five minutes worth of glorification of violence sells violence.”
U.S. Senator Paul Simon, Remarks to the Communitarian Network, 1993
Our knowledge of learning principles comes from the work of hundreds of investigators. This unit has focused on the ideas of a few pioneers—Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, B. F. Skinner, and Albert Bandura. They illustrate the impact that can result from single-minded devotion to a few well-defined problems and ideas. These researchers defined the issues and impressed on us the importance of learning. As their legacy demonstrates, intellectual history is often made by people who risk going to extremes in pushing ideas to their limits (Simonton, 2000).