Observational learning

Chimpanzees that dipped straws into juice boxes switched to sucking through them after watching other chimps do it.

Much of what people know was never rewarded or punished directly. You learned to use chopsticks or tie a tie by watching, and you probably found a repair video online the last time something broke. Learning by watching others and copying them is called observational learning, or modelling, and the people or animals being watched are models.

Animals do it too. In a study by Yamamoto, Humle and Tanaka (2013), two groups of captive chimpanzees were given juice boxes with straws. One group dipped the straw and licked the end; the other sucked through it and got far more juice. After the dippers watched the suckers, all of the dippers switched. No one trained them, and no one rewarded the switch beyond the juice itself.

Bandura and the Bobo doll

Four steps

Bandura described four steps that all have to happen. Attention: you must notice what the model is doing. Retention: you must remember it. Reproduction: you must be able to do it yourself, which is why watching a figure skater does not make you one. Motivation: you must want to. Seeing a model rewarded raises motivation (vicarious reinforcement); seeing a model punished lowers it (vicarious punishment). Bandura also separated three kinds of model: live models who show the behaviour in person, verbal models who describe it, and symbolic models in books, films, games and videos.

Does violent media make people violent?

The Bobo results led to a long debate about television and video games. OpenStax presents both sides. Craig Anderson and colleagues report evidence of a causal link between hours of violent media and aggressive thoughts and behaviour. Christopher Ferguson and others argue that a link may exist but that studies have not properly accounted for other risk factors such as mental health and family life. The honest summary is that the question is still open. It is also worth noticing what the Bobo studies measured: hitting a doll designed to be hit, minutes after watching, which is far from real violence.

For learners the useful side is prosocial: worked examples, demonstration videos and watching a skilled person think aloud are all forms of modelling. They work best when you then try the step yourself, which covers the reproduction step that watching alone cannot.