COLEGIO SAN JOSE DE ALAMINOS, INC
COLLEGE DEPARTMENT
COLLEGE OF ART, SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY
Alaminos City, Pangasinan
Subject: Educ. 2 – Facilitating Learning
Course: BSED- English II
2nd Semester, AY 2017-2018
Instructor: Robert V. Flores, Ed.D.
“The Power of Social Modeling: The Effect
of Television Violence”
Dr. Albert Bandura
Glaiza Mae C. Licayan
02-20-2018
“The Power of Social Modeling: The Effect of Television
Violence”
In social learning theory, Albert Bandura (1977) agrees with the behaviorist
learning theories of classical conditioning and operant conditioning. However, he
adds two important ideas:
Mediating processes occur between stimuli & responses.
Behavior is learned from the environment through the process of
observational learning.
There has been a considerable amount of research into inter-relationships between
the viewing of violent films, videos and TV programmes and aggressive behaviour
by the viewers of such material, in particular the behaviour of children. More
commonly, research is framed as being concerned with what are called the 'effects'
of television. This perspective represents the dominant paradigm in TV research. In
its crudest form the relationship between children and television is portrayed as a
matter of single cause and direct effect, which puts this kind of research firmly in
the behaviourist tradition.
Violence on television is practically inescapable for many television viewers as
even network television shows often showcase some manner of violence during a
season. Children tend to imitate actions they see. A child viewing a violent act on
television can be tempted to imitate the violence they observe. Aggressiveness
tends to increase in children who watch a great deal of violent television shows,
thus increasing the likelihood of imitating an act they observe. Children can be
influenced in this manner after watching a single violent television episode,
especially if the child is not monitored by an adult during exposure to the show.
The likelihood of imitation increases when the violent acts depicted go
unpunished in the specific television episode.
Statement of the Problem:
According to Bandura, there are three properties of violence that instill
widespread fear and all three were present in the Colorado incident.
There is unpredictability, no forewarning when or where violence might
occur.
The gravity of the consequences; individuals are unwilling to risk being
killed, raped or having their child abducted, even if the probability is
extremely low.
There is the property of uncontrollability, a perceived helplessness to exert
control. When these properties are present, a single incident can mar the
quality of life in communities.
Violent acts are a product of a constellation of factors, such that a change in any
one factor can result in the event not occurring.
Position:
Bandura explained that historically there have been three explanations for
aggression.
o The "Instinct" theory asserts that people are by nature aggressive. There is
no evidence of this, according to Bandura. In fact, there is further historical
evidence that societies change.
o The "Drive" theory holds that frustration causes aggression. This theory is
widely accepted even though research findings dispute it, says Bandura.
Frustration produces all kinds of reactions.
o Finally, "Social Cognitive" theory posits that aversive experiences produce
distress, causing emotional arousal and resulting in aggression. Bandura
notes, however, that people don't have to be distressed to aggress. Much
human aggression is prompted by the material and social benefits
anticipated for that type of behavior. Distress actually prompts all kinds of
behavior, depending on how a person has learned to deal with stress, and
most people marshal their resources to overcome the source of distress.
Similar results have been found in most experimental studies. They suggest that the
more violence is viewed, the greater the likelihood of aggressive behaviour.
However, apart from ethical objections one might raise, such experimental studies
have major limitations in terms of their artificiality. They have been criticized for a
lack of 'ecological validity' since they were concerned with strange behaviour in
strange settings:
children at home do not focus so closely on the screen
the programmes are often untypical of children's usual viewing, typically
short clips quite unlike normal TV
children don't often watch one-off programmes on TV; the focus in the lab
is on immediate or short-term influence
they don't often watch entirely on their own, or in large groups; they often
watch with siblings or friends, whose reactions are important; children's
normal viewing is often mediated by parents
Experimenters may effectively encourage aggression, offering unintended
cues. And children behave in strange surroundings as they feel they are
expected to: one child said, ‘Mummy is that the doll we have to hit?'
in an experiment children may not classify as deviant behaviour which they
might regard as such in everyday life
children normally make distinctions between 'fantasy' violence (like towards
a doll) and actual interpersonal violence
it is difficult to generalize about how representative the children are
Issues:
Observational Learning
1. Children observe the people around them behaving in various ways. This is
illustrated during the famous Bobo doll experiment (Bandura, 1961).
Individuals that are observed are called models. In society, children are
surrounded by many influential models, such as parents within the family,
characters on children’s TV, friends within their peer group and teachers at
school. These models provide examples of behavior to observe and
imitate, e.g., masculine and feminine, pro and anti-social, etc.
Children pay attention to some of these people (models) and encode their
behavior. At a later time they may imitate the behavior they have
observed. They may do this regardless of whether the behavior is ‘gender
appropriate’ or not, but there are a number of processes that make it more
likely that a child will reproduce the behavior that its society deems
appropriate for its gender.
2. Upon meeting Snow White at Disneyland, a preschooler said to her, "You're
not Snow White, you know." "Why do you say that?" asked Snow White.
"Well," the child replied, "if you were real, you'd be a cartoon." Such is the
power of the media in shaping children's images of reality.
Watching television fills the time a person might have spent doing
important, enriching things like interacting socially with other human
beings, being physically active, discovering the outdoors.
Television makes us antisocial, taking the place of family and friends.
3. Sensationalistic coverage of violent crimes tends to encourage imitative acts.
In a television drama, titled "The Doomsday Flight," an extortionist
threatened airline officials with an altitude-sensitive bomb that would
explode if the airplane descended below 5,000 feet. Of course, the pilot
outwitted the extortionists by landing at an airport above 5,000 feet.
Following the broadcast, there was an eight-fold increase in extortion
attempts using threats of altitude-sensitive bombs.
As the program was re-run in the United States and abroad, the same
pattern occurred; as a result, Qantas Airlines paid $560,000 to one
extortionist and Western Airlines $25,000 to another. Adults,
obviously, are equally influenced by modeling.
4. One of the questions frequently asked in the wake of the Littleton tragedy is
how two seemingly "normal" boys could have committed such an act.
Littleton cannot be prevented, says Bandura, but we can work toward
reducing their likelihood. What he would like to see is each cultural
subsystem takes some responsibility for their part in violent events -
TV, interactive media, the gun industry, parents. In the case of
television, he believes strongly that the goal should be to create better
programming, not to restrict material on television. But we need a
much greater public commitment to this for it to happen
As a result of his work on violent role models, Bandura began looking
at that question. "Most violent acts and large-scale inhumanities are
perpetrated by people who, in other areas of their life and in other
circumstances, are quite considerate in their behavior. "They inflict
inhumanities on others by selectively disengaging moral self-sanctions
from their injurious conduct. A "mechanism of moral disengagement"
occurs. He identified tactics such as euphemistic labeling which lead to
the minimizing of consequences and result in a displacement of
responsibility.
Facts:
The child is more likely to attend to and imitate those people it
perceives as similar to itself. Consequently, it is more likely to imitate
behavior modeled by people of the same gender.
The people around the child will respond to the behavior it imitates
with either reinforcement or punishment. If a child imitates a model’s
behavior and the consequences are rewarding, the child is likely to
continue performing the behavior. If a parent sees a little girl consoling
her teddy bear and says “what a kind girl you are,” this is rewarding for
the child and makes it more likely that she will repeat the behavior. Her
behavior has been reinforced
The child will also take into account of what happens to other people
when deciding whether or not to copy someone’s actions. A person
learns by observing the consequences of another person’s a younger
sister observing an older sister being rewarded for a particular behavior
is more likely to repeat that behavior herself. This is known as vicarious
reinforcement.
Prayers:
God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change;
Courage to change the things we can; and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as we would have it; Trusting that He will make all things right
if we surrender to His Will; So that we may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him, forever and ever in the next.
Amen.
References:
Bandura, A, D Ross & S A Ross (1961): 'Transmission of Aggression Through
Imitation of Aggressive Models', Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63:
575-82
Bandura, A (1965): 'Influence of Models' Reinforcement Contingencies on the
Acquisition of Imitative Responses', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology1:
589-95
