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Bandura's Bobo doll experiment
Preschool children who watched an adult attack an inflatable Bobo doll later copied much of that aggression in a new room. The study was small and short, used one nursery school, and shows nothing about advertising.
- Where it sits
- Academic psychologyResearch published for other researchers and students.
- Evidence level
- Independent experimentIndependent research, with its design and limits stated.
- Sources inspected
- 3 of 31 with the relevant text, company document or archive item checked, 2 as an abstract or reference article, 0 not verified.
What happened
In 1961 Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross and Sheila Ross reported an experiment with 72 children aged 37 to 69 months from the Stanford University Nursery School. Children in the model conditions watched an adult for 10 minutes, then spent 20 minutes in a room with toys that included an inflatable Bobo doll. The same authors published a follow-up with filmed models in 1963, confirmed here only as a bibliographic record.
The psychological idea
The experiment tested whether children imitate aggression they see an adult perform. There were three conditions of 24 children: an aggressive model, a nonaggressive model and no model. The aggressive model sat on the doll, punched it, struck it with a mallet and kicked it, with verbal aggression. Every child was then mildly frustrated by being told that attractive toys were reserved for other children.
In practice
No advertising or business use appears in the paper. Children who saw the aggressive model reproduced much of its physical and verbal aggression in a new room. In the aggressive condition, boys showed more imitative physical aggression than girls. Mallet aggression against objects other than the doll averaged 20.0 in the aggressive group and 13.3 in the control group, a difference that was not statistically significant.
Why it mattered
The authors suggested that mere observation of aggression may be enough to produce imitative aggression, whatever the quality of the relationship between child and model, and called for further comparative studies. Any application to advertising or media influence is interpretation and was not tested in this experiment.
Limits and qualifications
Cells were small, and the authors say subgroup comparisons may capitalise on chance and that the role of the model's sex cannot be tested directly. All children came from one nursery school, one woman tested them all, and a single 20-minute test session was scored, so lasting effects were not examined. Later media-violence research is disputed: a 2020 re-analysis reported no clear video-game link. That debate concerns other media, not this experiment.
Evidence behind the claims
The 1961 experiment used 72 preschool children (36 boys and 36 girls) aged 37 to 69 months from the Stanford University Nursery School, tested by one female experimenter, with one male and one female adult model.
There were three conditions of 24 children (aggressive model, nonaggressive model, no model); children watched a model for 10 minutes and were tested for 20 minutes in a room with a Bobo doll and other toys. The aggressive model sat on the doll, punched it, struck it with a mallet and kicked it, with verbal aggression, and every child was then mildly frustrated by being told that attractive toys were reserved for other children.
Children exposed to aggressive models reproduced much of the models' physical and verbal aggression in a new setting, and in the aggressive condition boys exceeded girls in imitative physical aggression (t = 2.50, p < .01).
Mallet aggression against objects other than the doll averaged 20.0 in the aggressive group and 13.3 in the control group, a difference that was not statistically significant.
The authors said cells were small and subgroup comparisons were likely to capitalise on chance, that the role of the model's sex cannot be tested directly with their data, and that mere observation of aggression, regardless of the quality of the model-subject relationship, could produce imitative aggression, calling for further comparative studies.
Bandura, Ross and Ross published Imitation of film-mediated aggressive models in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, volume 66, pages 3-11, in 1963.
An Association for Psychological Science news release reports that Ferguson, Coperhaver and Marley (2020) re-analyzed the American Psychological Association's 2015 task force meta-analysis on violent media and concluded that violent video games do not appear to be linked to aggression.
People involved
- Albert Bandura. Lead author, Stanford University
- Dorothea Ross. Co-author
- Sheila A. Ross. Co-author
In the Psy101 course
- OpenStax Psychology 2e, section 6.4: Observational Learning (Modeling)Chapter 6, Learning. Concept. The section discusses this topic.The reviewer opened the page: it describes the Bobo doll experiment, observational learning and the debate over media violence.
This is course relevance only. It is not evidence for the historical or corporate claims on this page.See the full course map.
Sources and inspection
3 of 3 sources were opened and read at the level shown. A source marked as not verified supports no claim on this page by itself.
- [1]Transmission of Aggression Through Imitation of Aggressive ModelsBandura, A.; Ross, D.; Ross, S. A.. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575-582 (Classics in the History of Psychology, York University), 1961. Journal article. Primary source.Relevant text checkedRead the HTML reprint as returned by the fetch tool: method, results text and discussion. Table 1 is an image and its values were not read. The reprint has no abstract.
- [2]Imitation of film-mediated aggressive modelsBandura, A.; Ross, D.; Ross, S. A.. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 66(1), 3-11, 1963. Journal article. Primary source.Abstract or publisher record onlyOnly the Crossref bibliographic record (title, authors, journal, year, volume, issue, pages). The 1963 paper was not opened, so none of its findings is stated.
- [3]Violent Video Games and Aggression: The Connection Is Dubious, at BestAssociation for Psychological Science. Association for Psychological Science, 2020. News report. Critique or replication.Reference article readRead the news release as returned by the fetch tool. It summarizes one 2020 re-analysis, reports no effect sizes, and concerns video games, not the Bobo doll study. The original paper was not opened.
Access note: Bandura's 1963 paper, his later books and critiques of demand characteristics were not opened at source, so they are not stated. The media-violence debate is represented by one news release only.
Independent source review: Claude review agent, independent of the research agent, 2026-10-21. Verdict: pass-with-edits.