Social Learning Theory and Social Identity Theory

1Two experiments with children

Stanford, 1961. A nursery-school child sits in a corner of a playroom, making pictures with stickers and potato prints. In another corner an adult, after a minute of playing quietly, turns to a 1.5-metre inflatable clown, the Bobo doll, and attacks it in unusual ways: sitting on it and punching its nose, hitting it with a wooden mallet, throwing it in the air and kicking it around the room, while shouting "Sock him in the nose!" and "Pow!". Later, alone with a Bobo doll, many of the children who had watched copied the same blows and the same words (Bandura, Ross and Ross, 1961).

Bristol, around 1970. Schoolboys aged 14 and 15 are told they have been placed in groups according to which of two painters' works they preferred. In fact the groups are random, the boys never meet the other members, and no one gains anything personally. Asked to share out small sums of money between anonymous members of their own group and the other group, most boys favour their own group (Tajfel and colleagues, 1971).

The first study is about how we learn behaviour from others; the second about how belonging to a group shapes who we favour. Together they explain a great deal of social behaviour.

21. Social learning theory (Bandura)

The 1961 study had 72 children aged about three to six from the Stanford University nursery school. A third saw an aggressive adult model, a third a calm model, and a third no model. Children who had seen the aggressive model showed far more aggression, much of it exact copies of the model's acts and words. Boys copied more physical aggression than girls, and children tended to copy a same-sex model more.

In 1965 Bandura showed children a film in which the model was either rewarded, punished or neither. Those who saw the model punished copied less. But when all the children were then offered treats for showing what the model had done, the differences disappeared: everyone had learned the behaviour; consequences decided whether they performed it.

Bandura (1977) described four processes that must all happen for observed behaviour to be imitated (Figure 1).

Bandura later stressed self-efficacy (people attempt what they believe they can do, and watching a similar person succeed raises it) and reciprocal determinism (person, behaviour and environment influence one another).

Evaluating the Bobo doll studies

• The Bobo doll is a toy designed to be hit and to bounce back, so hitting it may be play, not aggression towards a person.
• The children were deliberately mildly frustrated before testing, and were tested once, minutes after watching, so the studies say little about lasting effects.
• The children came from one university nursery school in the United States.
• It is debatable whether it was ethical to teach young children aggressive acts.
• The studies are strong on control and show clearly that new behaviour can be learned by observation alone, which earlier learning theories could not explain.

The theory has been widely applied, for example in "entertainment-education" radio and television dramas that use likeable characters to model healthy or peaceful behaviour, and in modelling therapy for fears.

32. Social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner)

The Bristol boys in the minimal group paradigm favoured their own group even though the groups were meaningless. More surprisingly, many chose allocations that gave their own group less money in absolute terms, as long as it got more than the other group: maximising the difference mattered more than maximising their group's gain.

Henri Tajfel and John Turner (1979) explained this with social identity theory. Part of our self-concept comes from our groups, and we want that identity to be positive. The process has three stages:

When a group's identity is seen as low status, members respond in different ways depending on whether group boundaries are permeable (can people leave?) and whether the status difference seems stable and legitimate:

• Individual mobility: leaving the group or distancing oneself from it, if boundaries are permeable.
• Social creativity: changing the comparison, e.g. "we are poorer, but more welcoming", or revaluing the group's traits.
• Social competition: challenging the higher-status group directly, likely when the difference seems illegitimate and changeable.

Evaluating social identity theory

• Strengths: it explains in-group favouritism without any conflict over resources, and it has been applied to prejudice, sport, politics and organisations. Its idea that identities can be widened underlies ways of reducing conflict (Unit 4).
• The minimal group studies are artificial, and may partly reflect what boys thought was expected in a "team" game. Margaret Wetherell (1982) found that Polynesian children in New Zealand were more generous to the out-group than European New Zealand children, so cultural norms shape the effect.
• The idea that favouring one's group raises self-esteem has only mixed support (Rubin and Hewstone, 1998).
• Favouring the in-group is not the same as hating the out-group (Brewer, 1999): most minimal-group favouritism is mild, so the theory needs other factors, such as threat and competition, to explain hostility and violence.