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Social Cognitive Theory Of Aggression Essay

1301 Words6 Pages

Aggression is a spoken or physical behavior that causes intentional harm to a person. There are many different theories that argue what the cause of aggression is but this can be divided into two major types: people who think that aggression is inborn and those that view it as a learning behavior. The Social cognitive theory states that we learn behaviors through observation and modeling and this could be implied that we learn aggressive behaviors through observing and imitating others.

The Social Cognitive theory claims that people learn behaviors from observation, modeling, and motivation such as positive reinforcement. Psychologists mention that people learn behaviors by imitating models through observational learning; as well as through …show more content…

The evidence is proved by the two studies: Bobo doll experiment by Bandura and the natural experiment conducted by Charleton. It is very practical in its ability to be applied in real life situations. The social cognitive theory can be applied to explain many things such as aggressive behaviors and how behaviors can differ in different cultures. Concerning the construct validity, this is hard to observe and measure because we cannot be certain what actually causes aggressive behaviors. The theory is unbiased, however, looking at the studies, they are both done on children. Thus, we don’t really know if the result is the same for all ages. From the studies shown above, we can predict the theory. We can predict that people learn behaviors through observing and imitating others; however, factors such as culture can influence one’s way of thinking about the …show more content…

However, this theory does not always state for all behaviors since thoughts and feelings are influenced by many other factors. Overall, with the amount of evidence, SCT is an important theory because it explains how behaviors are influenced by observational learning. It contributes largely to important human social behaviors as well as social implications. But the theory requires further research to overcome its limitations because we cannot be 100% sure that the aggressive behavior is the result of observing the

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That is, those results are more reasonable and believable. Also, social learning theory highly values person-in-environment, which can more comprehensively analyze human behavior with influence of social environment (Li, 2009). Besides, although the research on social learning theory focused on children, it does not ignore the roles of teachers, parents and elder family members in children’s lives. Actually, this theory encourages them to be a model and engage in children’s behavior learning process while the concepts of this theory is easy to understand.

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