Human Aggression

Essay by thething135High School, 10th gradeA+, February 2008

download word file, 3 pages 0.0

The Best Theory to Explain Human Aggression ------ Social Learning Michael Lai

Ever wondered why some people gets aggressive frequently while others stays calm. This is because of what the person learned from others in the past. The theory of this learning behavior of human is called social learning. Social learning is the most reliable theory to explain human aggression because there was an experiment done on this theory called the Bobo doll experiment which will be explained in details in a while. This experiment clearly shows that human imitate surrounding role model's actions for example being aggressive. Social learning best explains human aggression among these theories because there is solid evidence instead of abstract ideas.

In 1961, a man named Albert Bandura did an experiment to prove his theory that humans learn aggressive acts from their role model. This is the Bobo doll experiment. The subject of the experiment is 36 boys and 36 girls, aged from 3 to 6.

Bandura basically divided the group into three separate groups, each consisting of 12 girls and 12 boys. One of the groups will be exposed to aggressive acts, for example hitting the Bobo doll with a mallet, from a role model. Another group will be exposed to a non-aggressive role model playing normally with non-violent toys. The last group is the control group which is not exposed to any role models. After the experiment, the results have shown that children, who had been watching the violent role model, acted many times more aggressively during the experiment than those who have not. This result supported Bandura's theory that humans learn their aggressive behavior from other people because "both the imitative physical and verbal aggression were rarely, if ever, exhibited by the children exposed to the nonaggressive model or no model at...