"Watch and learn!" this was a famous phrase by my brother when he tried to teach me something. Little that I know that I was engaging in observational learning where I learned by watching my brother's action. This form of latent learning is quite beneficial for children growing in a good environment as they will likely see things that are not harmful to be learning such as learning to build dog house, learning to make flowerbeds and more. However, due to the development of technology, good and safe environment might no longer exist as children nowadays can learn to smoke and hit other people just by watching the television and surfing the web. This is what we called "observational learning of aggression" where Albert Bandura and his colleagues demonstrated that children can learn to act aggressively by watching aggressive role models (Bandura, Ross,&Ross, 1963). The role models in this case are the actors in the television who were unintentionally giving bad education to the children.
I had seen the effect of observational learning of aggression first hand when my little niece started to hit her younger brother after watching an action cartoon movie. This observational learning of aggression can only be prevented by the parents where the parents censored bad example in the television from their children. Aside from that, parents and older siblings also need to be careful with their actions in front of the children as the children might mimic their bad actions. However, knowing that acting like an angle every single day might be impossible, the adult needs to explain to the children about the consequences of doing bad things like stealing or smoking.
marzu003: October 2011 Archives
See the above picture; I think that most of us who are taking the psychology classes will know how absurd the subliminal self-help tapes are. We are the lucky one because if we were to search the internet for subliminal self-help tapes, we will notice how many people still believe in this nonsense. On the other hand, as long as it brings benefits to us, it wouldn't matter, right? Wrong!
We only think that subliminal self-help tapes bring benefit to us because of the illusory placebo effect. We have learned from the previous chapters that placebo effect is an improvement resulting from the mere expectation of improvement, so, this means that illusory placebo effect is an illusion of placebo effect.
Let say that I want to be more decisive so I bought one of the self-help tapes above, after a week, I will probably be able to decide better but is it really the works of the subliminal self-help tape or is it because I decided to convince myself that I will be more decisive after listening to the tape? Of course, it is because I have the expectation of being more decisive only after I listen to the tape. So, in conclusion buying subliminal self-help tapes is a waste of money and a waste of time, it is like we are trying to convince ourselves that we can change ourselves unconsciously by just listening or looking.
