RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

occurs in his environment. He imitates behaviour which he has noticed either because it is attractive to him, because it is practised by an attractive model ог because it brings a certain advantage to the person who makes use of this behaviour. Much behaviour, especially that which is not socially acceptable, ог advantageous to the individual, is not noticed. If such behaviour is observed, it is usually retained in the тетогу, but is never practised. In other words, in acquiring certain forms of behaviour, the individual copies both live models and symbolic ones, among which television models аге extremely suitable because of the nature of their medium. Bandura himself cites: »People can learn different forms of aggression even when examples and direct training in aggressive action аге lacking at home and in their immediate subculutre. The рптасу of television has greatly spread the sphere of mfluence of the models on which a child is brought up. Whereas his predecessors, particularly т middle-class homes, had limited opportunities to observe brutal aggression, the modern child is a wrtness of innumerable stabbings, shootings stranglings, blows and less brutal but equally destructive forms of cruelty before he has reached nursery school age... Thus, both children and adults, regardless of their social environment, have an unlimited number of opportunities to iearn from television models, copying aggressive styles and the whole school of delinquent behaviour in the comfort of their own homes.« 3 ) Bandura’s opinion is that the possibUity of people learnmg from symbolic as well as from realistic models shows television to be an important source ot social behaviour. There is a series of research statistics which show that violence is learned from television models. The majonty of experiments show through statistics that the witnessing of aggression stimulates aggression in life, regardless of whetherthe subjects were previously frustrated or not, as adherents of :he frustration theory claim. A series of instances rom life also show that certain methods of aggression аге copied from the small screen. -opymg of aggression on television is sometimes

5) Albert Bandura; Aggression: A Social Learning Analgsis, New Jersey, »Prentice-Hall«, 1973, p. 101.

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