Training on models, vicarious training

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Both children and adults naturally copy the behavior that they see in other people, and the behavior of people from the environment of the baby, teenager, adults often acts as a model for imitation and copying. Children love to repeat everything after adults, they do it easily and with pleasure, and when you yell, like in a bazaar, they copy your bazaar.

Model learning, or vicarious learning, is a natural process common to all people, a social form of imitation. People learn what they see, and conditioning only affects the repeatability of what is previously learned in the process of learning from models.

Man (and animals, too) is quite capable of drawing conclusions for himself from observing the consequences of the behavior of others. Indirect, observable reinforcement has the same consequences as reinforcing one’s own behavior.

At the same time, the very observation of how another person receives reinforcement (or punishment) can also significantly affect the reproducibility of behavior patterns (This is A. Bandura’s discovery and his contribution to B. Skinner’s approach).

Initially, a person copies the behavior of parents and close people, then classmates and teachers, favorite and unloved television heroes, bosses and politicians, spouses and heroes of television series. In this way, parents and teachers transmit behavioral patterns to children, who, in turn, serve as an object of modeling for classmates, embody the learned models in films and television programs, and record the accumulated experience in books and textbooks. The mechanisms of imitation and copying in the social environment, on the one hand, maintain its constancy and save time that would be spent on learning by trial and error, on the other hand, they contribute to changing the environment due to the emergence of new «fashionable», frequently occurring forms of behavior.

Model learning mechanisms do not have built-in ethical constraints. Any perceived, accessible and attractive behavior is copied. Painful, aggressive, or antisocial behavior is copied just as well as healthy, prosocial, and altruistic behavior.

In one of the early experiments of A. Bandura, a trained actor in the presence of children scoffed at a Bobo doll and beat her, receiving public praise for this. When the children were allowed to play with Bobo afterwards, they acted similarly aggressive towards her. Aggressive stereotypes of behavior were reproduced many months later.

In another experiment, children played skittles and, if successful, received chips that could be exchanged for very attractive things. The trained actor played along with them, but each time, without explaining anything, he donated (lowered into a mug) a part of the chips to a charitable foundation. Pretty soon the kids started doing the same. Months later, the children took part in a completely different game, but even then a large number of chips ended up in the charity circle.

A huge role in the mechanisms of learning on models in human society is played by the media — television, radio, the Internet and show business. Copying mechanisms are widely used for advertising and commercial purposes, less often for therapeutic and educational purposes. Unfortunately, commercial advertising is funded much better than social advertising. Freedom in the media often leads to the fact that aggressive and antisocial behaviors are presented from the screen in huge quantities.

When society, or at least parents, think about what our children see and what they can learn from it, learning by models transforms into learning by example and parenting by example.