Albert Bandura

Albert Bandura and the hypodermic syringe model- Albert Bandura is a psychologist who has made many theories about different subjects such as the social cognitive theory, therapy and personality psychology. He also talks about the hypodermic syringe model which suggests that the audience accepts the message 'injected' into them by the mass media. This model believes that there is a direct correlation between violent behaviour shown on TV, computer games, etc... and anti-social and criminal behaviour in real life.

An experiment Bandura carried out and recorded young woman beating up a bobo doll by punching the clown, kicking it, sitting on it, and hitting it with a little hammer and so on. She also shouted various aggressive phrases to the doll. After he recorded the session he showed it to groups of small children and then let sit in the room with the doll and all the toys used to attack the doll by the young woman. Bandura watched as the kids beat the daylights out of the Bobo doll, they punched, kicked, shouted, sat on the doll and hit the doll with little hammers. This shows that the children imitated the young lady in the film and shows that the children changed their behaviour in response to what they had seen on the TV. Bandura did this with a real clown and also did the same experiment with the doll and the clown but by being nice and the kids still imitated the action.

The experiment allowed Bandura to conclude that violent media content could lead to imitation or copycat violence. Also McCabe and Martin also looked at this experiment and concluded that this was only because the violence was shown as being heroic. Which brings across the 'disinhibition effect'.