Bobo Doll Experiment

The Bobo doll experiment was the name of the experiments conducted by Albert Bandura in 1961 and 1963 studying children´s behavior after watching a model aggress a bobo doll. There are different variations of the experiment. The most notable experiment measured the children's behaviour after seeing the model get rewarded, punished or experience no consequence for beating up the bobo doll.

This experiment is the empirical demonstration of Bandura's social learning theory. It shows that people not only learn by being rewarded or punished itself (Behaviorism), they can learn from watching somebody being rewarded or punished, too (Observational learning). These experiments are important because they sparked many more studies on the effects of observational learning and they have practical implication e.g. how children can be influenced watching violent media.