Chapter 7 Blog Post #1

Something that I found interesting in this chapter was the section on social learning and the bobo doll experiment. Behaviorists believe that infants learn by observing the behavior of others, in a process known as social learning. In this process, a person observes someone’s behavior as well as others’ reactions to that person’s behavior. They then take this behavior and either apply it to their lives or use caution against the behavior, based on whether the result was positive or negative. In the Bobo doll experiment, Albert Bandura placed children in a situation where they watched adults hitting a rubber Bobo clown. Afterwards, both boys and girls hit the Bobo doll just as they had observed the adults doing so. I think that social learning is something that applies not only to behaviors, but also to personality traits. The main influence for social learning is your family because you grow up around them and spend the most time with them. This is why it is especially essential for a child’s family to provide a good example for the child. As a child is growing into the adolescent years, I would say that the biggest influence in terms of social learning comes from their friends and their peers. In this stage of life, acceptance is everything. Teenagers will watch the behavior of their friends and copy behaviors that are accepted by their peers. This is extremely dangerous because teenagers can start to get involved in alcohol or even drugs because they see others exhibiting this behavior and they want to replicate the behavior. Social learning is something that affects a person from infancy to adulthood.