The Bodo Doll Theory

One of the most significant experiments performed by Albert Bendura was the Bodo Doll experiment which was performed in 1961 and is still debated even after five decades with regards to its findings and the underlying relevance it has to the contemporary debates related to increasing incidence of child violence along with the underlying role of media. The importance of this research can be adjudged from the fact that at the time it was felt that genetics was the major factor which was responsible for the behaviour of children and social learning theory which advocates humans as learning from social environment was in its nascent stages with Bendura acting as one of the pioneers of this line of thinking.
In this regard, it is first to analyse …show more content…
They advocate selection bias in the selection of sample of children who were all selected from the Stanford School nursery and thus would be most likely to have the Stanford students as their parent who at the time i.e. 1961 were predominantly all white and thus effectively the experiment tends to ignore the role of race and social economic background. This factor is particularly relevant in the contemporary times when there is significant difference in the violence rates of children belonging to the blacks and whites which may be linked to race i.e. biological factors or the comparatively low social economic standard of blacks as compared to the whites which forces them to resort to violence. Additional reference may be given to Merton’s theory of deviance which to some extent also accounts for juvenile violence and crimes and thus sees deviance in behaviour and conduct from the accepted social norms as the reaction to not been able to achieve societal goals through established institutional and social means. Hence this indicates that high degree of violence in children needs to be analysed from the point of view of their individual circumstances especially in context of marginalised sections that are not given equality of opportunity and resources and thus may resort to violence to gain acceptance, recognition and at times survival. Additionally for some sections of minority, violence may be a inevitable way which may be justified on the basis of their underlying insecurity (Haralambos & Holborn, 1995). As a result, Bendura has ignored the role of biological, social and environmental issues at hand which play a critical role in the underlying behaviour of a child and has instead reduced it to only social learning through