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The Bobo Doll Experiments
Bandura 's 1961 and 1963 studies at Stanford in which children who observed adults attacking an inflatable clown reproduced the aggression without direct reinforcement — the empirical foundation of social learning theory and, indirectly, of the vicarious component of self-efficacy.
Between 1961 and 1963, Albert Bandura and his colleagues at Stanford conducted a series of experiments in which preschool children observed adults interacting with an inflatable Bobo doll. Some adults attacked the doll — punching, kicking, striking it with a mallet, shouting distinctive phrases. When the children were later placed alone with the doll, those who had observed aggression reproduced the specific behaviors, including phrases they had only heard once. The finding contradicted the behaviorist orthodoxy that learning required direct reinforcement and established that observation alone could produce durable behavioral change. The experiments became the empirical foundation of social learning theory and, through it, of the vicarious source of self-efficacy.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The behaviorist framework dominant in mid-century American psychology held that behavior was shaped by reinforcement histories — rewards and punishments directly applied to the organism. Observational learning, if acknowledged at all, was treated