WJEC Level 3 Applied Certificate & Diploma Criminology sample

AC2.2 DESCRIBE INDIVIDUALISTIC THEORIES OF CRIMINALITY Violence and aggression are produced by: • an arousal event (provocation) • learned aggressive skills • expected success and rewards • pro-violence values. People pay attention to models and copy their behaviour. If imitating a model’s behaviour is rewarding, we are more likely to continue performing the behaviour. How do the findings for the bobo doll experiment account for criminality? Criminal behaviour, like any other, can be learned from observation. Some people learn criminal behaviour from those around them, for example family. We term this observational learning. This is where viewers learn behaviours from watching others and may imitate them; many behaviours are learned from the media. CASE STUDY BANDURA AND THE BOBO DOLL EXPERIMENT (1963) Bandura carried out a series of tests involving a bobo doll (see McLeod, 2014). The experiment involved exposing children to two different adult models: an aggressive model and a non-aggressive one. In the aggressive model adults were seen to kick and pummel the doll and also hit it with a mallet and throw it in the air. After witnessing the adults’ behaviour, the children would then be placed in a room without the model and were observed to see if they would imitate the behaviours they had witnessed earlier. The experiment showed that children exposed to the aggressive adults tended to copy such behaviour. They even came up with new ways to hurt the doll, for example using a toy gun to shoot it or throwing darts at it. Children who watched the non-aggressive version demonstrated far less aggression towards the bobo. A bobo doll 97