Bandura's"Bobo doll" study of social learning and aggression (a) exposed children to a videotape in which someone either played nicely with toys or played aggressively with them, and then (b) measured how often children behaved aggressively toward an inflatable doll (i.e., how often they hit it) in the playroom afterwards. A valid criticism of the study is that:

Question

Bandura's"Bobo doll" study of social learning and aggression (a) exposed children to a videotape in which someone either played nicely with toys or played aggressively with them, and then (b) measured how often children behaved aggressively toward an inflatable doll (i.e., how often they hit it) in the playroom afterwards. A valid criticism of the study is that:

a.
The study was unethical due to the harm caused to the inflatable doll.

b.
There was no independent or dependent variable.

c.
The study did not use an operational definition of children's aggression.

d.
It may be hard to generalize these results to what we really care about--children's behavior with other children in the social world.

Answer 1

The valid criticism of Bandura's "Bobo doll" study of social learning and aggression is option d - it may be hard to generalize these results to what we really care about, which is children's behavior with other children in the social world.

To understand why this is a valid criticism, let's break down the study design and its limitations:

In Bandura's study, children were exposed to a videotape showing someone playing either nicely or aggressively with toys, and then their behavior with an inflatable doll was observed in a playroom setting. The study measured how often the children behaved aggressively towards the doll, specifically how often they hit it.

One potential criticism of this study is that the findings may not accurately reflect how children would behave in real-life social interactions with other children. The toy being used, the inflatable doll, may not sufficiently represent a real child and the behavior observed in the study may not fully capture the complexity and nuances of actual social interactions. Therefore, it may be difficult to generalize the study's results to children's behavior with other children in the social world.

While options a, b, and c may raise concerns as well, they do not directly address the limitation regarding the generalizability of the study's findings to children's behavior with other children. Option a, suggesting that the study was unethical due to harm caused to the inflatable doll, may not be a valid criticism because the study did not involve harm to real children. Option b, stating that there was no independent or dependent variable, is not accurate as there were independent variables (aggressive vs. non-aggressive video) and a dependent variable (aggressive behavior towards the doll). Option c, claiming that the study did not use an operational definition of children's aggression, is also not valid as the behavior of hitting the doll was measured, providing an operational definition of aggression in this context.

In summary, option d is the valid criticism of Bandura's "Bobo doll" study because it questions the generalizability of the study's results to real-life social interactions among children.

Answer 2

What does your text say about it? Read that, and this, and decide which answer is best:

http://www.simplypsychology.org/bobo-doll.html