Albert Bandura - Media Effects

Bandura's theory is now considered outdated and irrelevant and should therefore be critiqued and not used to support any argument.

It assumes a passive audience and  focuses on the extent to which the media could be held responsible for problems in society.

He said there were two types of learning; by direct experience and through modelling. This mostly concerned child behavioural psychology, but have been frequently applied to media effects debates.

The bobo doll experiments (1961-63) had an adult modelling agressive behaviour to a doll and then had children watch the video and were then put in a room with the doll. Generally the children would imitate the aggressive behaviour modelled to them by an adult.

Moral Panics: It is claimed that the 10 year old killers of James Bulger in 1993 had seen Child's play 3 before the attack. They mimicked the film by splattering the child with paint before they killed him in the same style as the movie.

In 1999, two teenagers killed 13 people at their high school in Columbine, Colarado. People blamed the media products that they had access to such as the game Doom, the film Natural Born Killers and the music of Marilyn Manson (although it was later found out they were not fans of his music)

According to Bandura, there are four related subprocesses to learning through modelling:

- Attentional Processes (If we are not paying attention to the model there is a low chance to learn from them.)

- Retention Processes (If we cannot remember what we've observed there is a low chance we'll learn the behaviour.)

- Motoric Reproduction processes (If someone doesn't have the physical skills to copy the behaviour, this will influence learning. For example if a child watches someone swing a golf club they may not learn from this as they do not have the physic coordination to replicate this behaviour.)

- Reinforcement & Motivational Processes (If we watch someone be rewarded or punished for their behaviour or we are rewarded or punished for our behaviour it will reinforce the likelihood of us wanting to do it. Additional research has shown that liking and identifying with the model are important motivational influences as well.)