by DK
During the late 1930s, Kenneth Clark and his wife, Mamie Phipps Clark, studied the psychological effects of segregation on African-American schoolchildren, particularly on their self-image. They designed a “doll test” that would indicate children’s awareness of racial differences and their underlying attitudes about race. Working with children between the ages of three and seven, they used four dolls, each identical in appearance except for the color of their skin, which ranged from shades of white to dark brown. The children showed an undeniable awareness of race by correctly identifying the dolls on the basis of their skin color, as well as identifying themselves in racial terms by choosing the doll that looked most like them.
In order to explore the children’s attitudes about race, the Clarks asked each of them to point out the doll they liked best or most wanted to play with; the doll that had a nice color; and the doll that looked bad. Distressingly, black children showed a clear preference for the white dolls and a rejection of the black dolls, which can be interpreted as indirect self-rejection. Convinced that this reflected the children’s tendency to absorb racial prejudices that exist in society and then to turn this hatred inward, the Clarks asked a very important question: “Who teaches a child to hate and fear a member of another race?”
"Segregation is a way in which society tells a group of human beings that they are inferior."
Kenneth Clark
Passing on prejudice
The Clarks sought to understand the influences shaping prejudice in America, and decided that as children learn to evaluate racial differences, according to the standards of society, they are required to identify with a specific group, and each racial group has an implied status within a hierarchy. That young black children preferred the white doll showed they were aware American society preferred white people, and had internalized this. Children as young as three had expressed similar attitudes to those of adults in their community.
The Clarks concluded that these attitudes are determined by a mix of influences, including parents, teachers, friends, television, films, and comics. Although it is very rare for parents to deliberately teach their children to hate other racial groups, many subtly and unconsciously pass on dominant social attitudes. Some white parents, for example, may discourage their children from playing with their black peers, implicitly teaching them to fear and avoid black children.
Clark’s 1950 summary of his research insisted that segregation was damaging the personalities of white and black children alike. His expert testimony in court cases tied into the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case, which determined that racial segregation was unconstitutional in public schools, contributed directly to desegregated schooling and to the Civil Rights Movement in America.
Clark’s doll experiments of the late 1930s and early 1940s showed that black children in segregated schools often preferred white dolls, a sign that they had absorbed prevailing prejudices.
KENNETH CLARK
Kenneth Clark was born in the Panama Canal Zone, but moved to Harlem, New York, when he was five. After his mother refused to accept a ruling that her son would be limited to trade or vocational schooling, Clark was enrolled in high school. He went on to earn a master’s degree in psychology from Howard University, Washington DC, where he met his wife. The pair carried out research together, becoming the first African-American man and woman to receive a PhD in psychology from Columbia University in New York City. They also founded child development and youth opportunity centers in Harlem.
Clark was also the first African-American to hold a permanent professorship at the City University of New York, and to serve as the president of the American Psychological Association.
Key works
1947 Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children
1955 Prejudice and Your Child
1965 Dark Ghetto
1974 Pathos of Power
See also: Elliot Aronson • Muzafer Sherif
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Feminist psychology
BEFORE
Early 20th century First research into sex differences by female psychologists.
1970s Studies of the sexes tend to emphasize differences between men and women.
AFTER
1980s Studies suggest structural differences between the male and female brain.
1993 Anne Fausto-Sterling claims biological graduations exist between “male” and “female,” such that we can identify five different sexes along the spectrum.
2003 Simon Baron-Cohen argues that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and the male brain for understanding systems.
The emergence of feminist psychologists during the 1970s revived an interest in the study of sex differences, which had waned during the rise of behaviorism. Feminist concerns became increasingly important to US psychologist Eleanor Maccoby. Frustrated by the tendency of psychological literature to report on research findings that emphasized the differences between men and women rather than the similarities, Maccoby, with student Carol Jacklin, reviewed more than 1,600 studies of gender differences. They published their findings in The Psychology of Sex Differences (1974) with the aim of showing that what most consider essential differences between the sexes are in fact myths, and that many gender stereotypes are untrue. Although some findings had shown boys to be more aggressive and more adept at mathematics and spatial reasoning than girls, and girls to have superior verbal abilities, subsequent studies revealed that these differences are either negligible or are more complex than they initially appear.
One difference that was consistent and undeniable was that “girls get better grades than boys” in school. Maccoby found this particularly interesting, especially considering that girls did not obtain higher aptitude test scores when all of the subject matter areas were reviewed. Furthermore, previous research into achievement motivation seemed to suggest that boys should outperform their female peers. Males were arguably more oriented toward achievement for its own sake than girls, showing greater task involvement, and more exploratory behavior; females were primarily interested in achievement relating to interpersonal relationships—exerting effort to please others, and demonstrating low self-confidence with respect to many tasks.
"Intellectual development in girls is fostered by their being assertive and active."
Eleanor E. Maccoby
Challenging stereotypes
Maccoby systemically argued against these assumptions, pointing to the fact that girls are higher academic achievers than boys, show greater interest in school-related skills from an early age, and are less likely to drop out before completing high school. Maccoby concluded that their better grades clearly reflect some combination of greater effort, greater interest, and better work habits than their male peers. Whatever discrepancy exists between boys and girls in terms of achievement motivation does not reflect school-related motivation. This motivation could prove significant throughout girls’ lives, as performance at school is also relevant to job performance.
The ongoing debate over inherent sex differences is tied up with general political questions about how society should be organized, and the roles that men and women are “naturally” equipped to fill. By pointing out that psychological literature tends to publish results indicating sex differences, while ignoring those indicating equality, Maccoby has fought against the assignment of men and women to stereotypical professions.
Girls show greater responsiveness to teacher’s expectations and are more willing to work, according to Maccoby’s research, which makes them more likely to do better at
school than boys.
ELEANOR E. MACCOBY
Born in Tacoma, Washington, Eleanor Maccoby (née Emmons) earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington and an MA and PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Michigan. In the 1940s, she worked for the Department of Agriculture, and then at Harvard University, supervising research on child-rearing practices. Perceiving that gender bias was holding her back, she moved to Stanford University, where she became the first woman to serve as Chair of the Psychology Department. Maccoby went on to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychology Foundation and The American Psychological Association introduced an award in her name. Maccoby’s work to debunk stereotypes is considered fundamental to understanding children’s socialization and gender differences.
Key works
1966 The Development of Sex Differences
1974 The Psychology of Sex Differences
1996 Adolescents after Divorce
See also: Janet Taylor Spence • Simon Baron-Cohen
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Social learning theory
BEFORE
1938 B.F. Skinner proposes the behaviorist notion of operant conditioning, which explores positive and negative reinforcements in learning.
1939 US psychologist John Dollard argues that aggression is always a consequence of frustration, and that frustration always leads to aggression.
AFTER
1966 American psychologist Leonard Berkowitz claims environmental cues, such as those associated with aggressive behavior, must be present for aggression to follow anger.
1977 US psychologist Robert A. Baron suggests that Bandura’s experiment implies that violence in the media contributes to violence in society.
In the 1940s and 1950s, learning was understood primarily in behaviorist terms, with B.F. Skinner’s theory of operant conditioning—in which learning is wholly determined by rewards and punishments—dominating the field. From this context emerged Albert Bandura’s interest in studying childhood aggression—an area he felt was too complex to explain in terms of operant conditioning—as a learned behavior.
Bandura’s hypothesis was that children learn aggression through observing and imitating the violent acts of adults—particularly family members. He believed that the key to the problem lies at the intersection of Skinner’s operant conditioning and Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of identification, which explores how people assimilate the characteristics of others into their own personalities. Bandura’s work culminated in his famous Bobo doll experiment, and his hugely influential 1977 treatise Social Learning Theory.
Social learning theory
Bandura’s belief that people learn not through reinforcement (rewards and punishments), but through observing others, is at the heart of social learning theory. This theory suggests that learning is achieved by mentally rehearsing and then imitating the observed actions of other people, who serve as models of appropriate or acceptable behavior. Bandura argued that “most human behavior is learned through modeling.”
Bandura noted four conditions that are necessary for a person to successfully model the behavior of another: attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation. Learning requires that the learner is paying attention to the behavior in the first place, that he remembers what he saw or heard, that he is actually able to physically reproduce the behavior, and that he has a good motive or reason to reproduce it, such as the expectation of reward.
Although the concept of reward is part of his social learning theory, Bandura’s move away from behaviorism is evident in his radical, anti-behaviorist ideas about the relationship between a person’s environment and his or her behavior. According to behaviorism, environmental circumstances entirely determine behavior, but Bandura believes in “reciprocal determinism”—the idea that a person influences the environment just as the environment influences him. Bandura conceived of personality as an interaction between three different components: the environment, behavior, and psychological processes (the ability to use language and entertain images in the mind). All of these components are relevant to the study of childhood aggression, which, Bandura argued, was learned by watching and modeling adults.
"Behavior partly created the environment, and the resultant environment, in turn, influenced the behavior."
Albert Bandura
Bobo doll experiment
Bandura’s social learning point of view was the basis for his 1961 Bobo doll experiment on childhood aggression, which sought to explain how aggressive behavior develops, what provokes people to carry out aggressive acts, and what determines whether they will continue to behave aggressively. By proving that a child will imitate the behavior of an adult role model, the experiment showed the power of examples of aggression in society.
For the experiment, 36 boys and 36 girls, all between the ages of three and six, were recruited from a local nursery school. They were divided up into three groups of 24, each comprising 12 boys and 12 girls. The first group was the control group (which did not see any adult role model); the second group was exposed to an adult modeling aggressive behavior toward an inflatable Bobo doll; the third group was exposed to a passive adult model. All of the children in the experiment were tested individually to ensure that they would not be influenced by their peers.
In the experiments on the second group, each child watched an adult performing physically and verbally aggressive acts toward the doll. The adult pummeled the large Bobo toy with a mallet, flung it in the air, kicked it, threw it down on the floor, and beat it. When each child was later left alone in a room of toys that included a Bobo doll, he or she imitated a good deal of the aggressive acts performed by the the adult models, even creating novel acts of violence against the doll. Children in this group were also generally less inhibited than those in the other groups, showing an increased attraction to guns despite the fact that playing with guns was not modeled.
By contrast, children who were either in the control group or who were exposed to a passive adult model only rarely demonstrated any kind of physical or verbal aggression. Although Bandura did consider the possibility that observing aggressive acts merely weakened any inhibitions that the children may have already had about behaving violently, the fact that they often imitated the exact behavior they had just seen suggests that observational learning was taking place.
Children attack the Bobo doll in Bandura’s 1961 experiment on aggressive behavior. In some cases, subjects devised new ways to attack the doll by using other toys in the room.
Violence in the media
Bandura’s research has raised many important questions surrounding the prevalence of violence in the media. If a stranger performing aggressive acts can be a model of aggression for children, you might argue that television programs could also be considered a source of behavior modeling. Modern films and television shows include graphic violence, which is often expressed as an acceptable (or at least expected) form of behavior, which children who are regularly exposed to the media may feel inclined to imitate. This idea has been hotly debated. Many studies indicate that violent films and television shows do not increase a child’s tendencies toward violence. Some studies even indicate that exposure to violence can actually decrease the amount of aggression in children. This theory—known as the Catharsis effect—suggests that an individual may be able to relate to a violent on-screen character and release negative feelings, thereby becoming less aggressive personally than prior to the viewing.
Other psychologists regard television as a form of edu
cation, and believe that, as characters often serve as role models for children, they should be positive models in order to help decrease the general level of violence prevalent in society.
Although Bandura himself does not believe in the Catharsis effect of viewing aggressive behavior, he was careful to note that there was a distinction between learning and performance. Children, he thought, could certainly learn aggressive behavior from viewing it, but knowledge of violent acts would not necessarily result in committing these acts themselves. He warned against assuming a more direct and causal relationship between violence in the media and real-world aggression.
Social learning theorists accept that cognition has a part to play in modeling, and that cognitive factors mediate the process between viewing violence and actually imitating it. For instance, the perception and interpretation of TV violence, and how realistic the program is, are both important intervening variables. Bandura also considers that environmental experiences are another influence in the social learning of aggression in children. Unsurprisingly, people living in neighborhoods with high crime rates are more likely to commit acts of violence than those living in low-crime areas.
Violence in computer games, and in the media generally, has been cited as a potential source of behavior modeling, although this view has not been strongly supported by studies.
