Good day. This is the last lecture on learning and today I'm talking about observational learning. It's actually quite different from the previous topics we've covered in terms of basic exposure, classical conditioning, or operant conditioning.
This form of learning represents learning through observation rather than direct experience. And I have a video, it's a classic video here, and there's this famous researcher, actually a Canadian from Edmonton, Alberta, Albert Bandura. He's the one who did this original study.
And what he did is he did a study where he had children and... they would watch an adult go into a big large room full of toys and games and objects. And half of the children watch the adult go in and do sort of regular things that an adult would do, playing or looking at objects or toys or whatever.
And then half of the other children actually watch the same adult go in and start hitting and kicking and beating a little blow-up doll. It was called a Bobo doll. And you can sort of see it in the picture here on the right.
So basically, then he let the children, each individual child watched this scene. And then the child would just go into the room and they'd be free to play and do whatever they wanted. And they were video recorded while they did this.
And what happened, and it was pretty clear, was that the children who watched the adult beat up the Bobo doll were much more likely to beat up the Bobo doll themselves. Not only that, they were quite creative in beating up the Bobo doll. So they didn't just hit the Bobo doll in exactly the same way that the adult did.
They were actually creative and clever in finding new and interesting ways to beat up the Bobo doll. So this was evidence from Bandura's perspective that learning occurs and it occurs without... them being directly reinforced in terms of operant conditioning. Like somebody didn't have to say to them, oh, you know, watch them hit the Bobo doll and say, good job, keep hitting that Bobo doll and use praise to reinforce their behavior. Because they were in no ways directly reinforced for doing this.
They simply watched an adult go into a room, kick the crap out of a Bobo doll, and then they went in there and they did sort of a very similar thing. So that was actually a fairly stark contrast to the reinforcement perspective of learning that had been dominant at the time. Now there's four basic elements necessary in order for observational learning to happen.
One, the creature, the animals, or the person needs to notice what's going on. So they have to see that a conspecific, somebody from their same species, typically, that would be most common. Another adult. an older child, somebody that's like them in some particular way, is doing something. So they have to notice it.
They have to be able to remember it. If they were distracted, or they're very tired, or very hungry, they might notice it and then just forget it because they had other stuff to do. So they have to notice it. They have to be able to remember it, retain that information.
Not only that, in order for them to later show evidence of observational learning, they have to be able to reproduce it themselves. They have to be capable of imitating the actions that they saw somebody else do. So that's the reproduction component. And finally, they have to be put in a situation where they're motivated to do a similar action. So they have to be in a similar situation and they have to either want or need to do that.
And then those four basic conditions would allow creatures including humans, to demonstrate or show that observational learning had actually occurred. That even though they were not personally encouraged or told or reinforced for doing something, they learned. They just simply watched somebody.
They saw if I was ever in that situation, this is something I could do, and maybe I'll do that in the future. Okay, so a basic question. Who are we most likely to model?
Well, peers versus non-peers. I think we're more likely to model peers, basically. Like as an adult, you're a young adult. If you were to watch a little kid do something in a room or in a different social situation and the kid was acting in a particular way, you wouldn't necessarily want to model yourself after them. If they started climbing on the tables or chairs or, you know, dancing and swirling and twirling around in the dining in the cafe, you probably wouldn't say, oh, I'm going to do that when I get to the cafe.
On the other hand, if you saw maybe a group of peers doing the same thing. you might be more likely to. So you have to, you look at the peers, you look at the people doing it and you make a judgment as whether that's relevant to you. Is that somebody you would want to imitate or model? I think another basic component or evaluation in terms of whether you're likely to model the person or not is whether you know they have, if they're popular or unpopular.
So it's a peer, but if it looks like somebody who's unpopular and you know, not liked well, then you're not going to want to imitate them because like most people, you would want to be admired or popular or liked in some way. You wouldn't want to be imitating people who aren't, who are unpopular and not liked well. So this basically comes down to the components of competence, likableness, and status. And finally, if they're higher status or they have somehow social power.
That's, again, something that would benefit you personally, maybe. It's like, whoa, so here's a person that I think I should model. So I will pay attention to them. I'll see how they do things.
And maybe I'll imitate them in the future. So in summary, these social cognitive theories, or like this particular one, there's multiple ones, they're a little bit different than the previous forms of learning. They emphasize...
how behavior is learned and maintained through the observation and imitation of other people or creatures. Creatures do the same imitation process. I pointed out, or hopefully it's clear, that this depends on certain cognitive mechanisms or processes. You need to notice it, so attention, you need to be able to retain it or memory, you need to form expectations. expectations and evaluations so you evaluate the model to see is this a person i would want to obtain uh imitate is this um a person with high status so you look at the at the the model themselves and see if that would apply to you and what would be the resulting implications from imitating somebody like that and that and that also your preferences like what would you like to happen to you and and if you would like similar things to happen to you as is probably happening to the model, then you'll imitate them and you'll learn from them.
And I wanted to emphasize that this, to some degree, represents a form of vicarious learning. That means that you can see what the consequences are for other people. So person A, you know, is jerky and then other people get mad at them. Person B is friendly and other people are nice to them.
You can decide, well, do I want people mad at me? Or do I want people happy with me and nice to me? So you can learn without having directly forced or punished yourself or classically conditioned. So you can learn vicariously just by through the observations of others and what happens to other people.
You can decide expectations and preferences. You can evaluate and decide whether which of those social outcomes or physical outcomes or consequences you want to happen to you. So in other words, learning is much more than classical conditioning or operative conditioning as implied in those earlier standard conditioning procedures.
So that's it for the learning lectures and if you have any questions let me know and talk to you again.