Bandura's Bobo Dolls

Bandura's Bobo Doll experiment is one that I always remember because of the ridiculous looking dolls the children were required to hit!

Bobo Doll Experiment
Albert Bandura believed that aggression must explain three aspects: First, how aggressive patterns of behavior are developed; second, what provokes people to behave aggressively, and third, what determines whether they are going to continue to resort to an aggressive behavior pattern on future occasions (Evans, p. 22, 1989).

In this experiment, he had children witness a model aggressively attacking a plastic clown called the Bobo doll. There children would watch a video where a model would aggressively hit a doll and " ‘...the model pummels it on the head with a mallet, hurls it down, sits on it and punches it on the nose repeatedly, kick it across the room, flings it in the air, and bombards it with balls... After the video, the children were placed in a room with attractive toys, but they could not touch them. The process of retention had occurred.

Therefore, the children became angry and frustrated. Then the children were led to another room where there were identical toys used in the Bobo video. The motivation phase was in occurrence. Bandura and many other researchers founded that 88% of the children imitated the aggressive behavior. Eight months later, 40% of the same children reproduce the violent behavior observed in the Bobo doll experiment. (Isom, 1998)
http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/crimtheory/bandura.htm