— Overview
The report compares what each experiment was designed to show, and warns against merging classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and observational learning into one slogan.
— Contents and key concepts
What the report covers
This paper compares three well-known experimental arrangements: Pavlov's conditioning work, Skinner's operant chamber, and Bandura's Bobo doll studies. It is not a social-work application of conditioning, and it is not a full theory paper on self-efficacy.
The three demonstrations answer different questions. A table that pretends they are three versions of the same law is weaker than a page that keeps the questions apart.
Pavlov and the conditioned reflex
Pavlov showed that a cue can, after pairing, elicit a response that once belonged to another stimulus. Salivation in the laboratory is the familiar illustration. The unit of analysis is a reflex, not a chosen skill.
A student write-up should say what the pairing was, what was measured, and why the finding does not by itself explain a classroom routine or a complex social act.
The Skinner box and operant rate
In the operant chamber, a response is emitted and then followed by a consequence. Reinforcement, extinction, and schedules of reinforcement are the vocabulary. The record is often a response rate over time, not a single elicited drop of saliva.
Skinner's claim is about the control of emitted behavior by its consequences. It is not a theory of what a child copies from a film.
Bandura's observational arrangement
The Bobo doll studies asked whether children would reproduce aggressive acts after watching a model. Learning could be shown even when the child was not reinforced for those acts during the viewing. That is the contrast with a strict operant or classical account of the same episode.
A fair comparison ends with one short vignette — a fear of a sound, a habit of pressing a button, a child copying a gesture — and writes which experiment's logic fits each case.
Sources
- Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes. Oxford University Press.
- Skinner, B. F. (1938). The behavior of organisms. Appleton-Century.
- Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63(3), 575–582.
Last updated: November 13, 2026
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