Which concept does Bandura's Bobo Doll experiment exemplify?

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Bandura's Bobo Doll experiment is a seminal study that illustrates the concept of observational learning, where individuals learn behaviors through the observation of others. In this experiment, children observed an adult displaying aggressive behavior toward a Bobo doll, which is an inflatable toy. After witnessing this aggression, many of the children later imitated the same behaviors when given the opportunity to play with the doll themselves, demonstrating that they learned the aggressive actions simply by watching the adult.

This process highlights the role of modeling, where observing the behavior of a model (in this case, the adult) influences the observer's subsequent actions. Bandura's findings emphasized that learning does not only occur through direct experience, as seen in operant conditioning, where behavior is shaped by rewards or punishments, or in classical conditioning, where an association is formed between a stimulus and a response. Instead, Bandura showed that social context and the environment can profoundly impact how individuals learn and behave through observation. Thus, the Bobo Doll experiment strongly exemplifies the principles of observational learning.

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