By beholding we become changed, so the question is, what are you beholding, how is it changing you, and how can you have victory over the media and entertainment choices you make?

<p>By beholding we become changed, so the question is, what are you beholding, how is it changing you, and how can you have victory over the media and entertainment choices you make?</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

The Nicodemus Society

David Kim

Beating Bobo

And it's a joy, it's a pleasure to be with you in the house of the Lord this morning.

Brother Clayton, I want to thank you for that prayer.

Anyone who's doing intercessory prayer needs to pray for the speaker because it really warms the speaker's heart to know that people are praying for him or her.

We need it because we're just, the speaker is just a person like you are.

And so we need all the prayer we can get.

So thank you, Brother Clayton, for that prayer.

And that is my prayer that you would see Jesus this morning through the word that I've prepared for you.

I want to pose to you a question this morning.

Whether it's in school or whether it's in life, how do we learn?

Even better when you learn from someone else's experience.

But for some reason we all feel like we need to make the same mistakes so that we can be convinced of it.

We learn by observing the world around us and others.

We listen, we observe, we have experience.

These are all very good answers, but did you know that it's only relatively recently that at least psychology realized these things?

In fact, it wasn't until the 1960s when it was demonstrated through experiments this idea of learning through observation.

Prior to that time there was a so-called behaviorist model of learning.

Now that's a big umbrella and I'm not going to go into all the nuances of what goes into that.

But what I will say is that 1 of the most strident, strong forms of the behaviorist model of learning believed that learning was really about stimulus, response, incentives, and punishment.

Meaning, they believed that our behavior was simply a matter of receiving stimuli from our surroundings and then our neurons would do whatever computation they do and then out pops new learning, new behaviors.

So in other words, they're saying that any person given the same circumstances would do the same thing.

Because our Behavior and our learning is more a matter of calculation, calculation by our DNA and calculation by our brain paths and things like that, but that just like in a computer, if you put the same code into a computer, it ought to come with the same output every single time.

And this was the prevalent view of how the human brain worked before the 1960s, which is totally different from all the answers that we just gave.

Then in 1961, there was a psychologist at Stanford University named Albert Bandura.

And he conducted what became known as the Bobo doll experiment.

Now do any of you know what a Bobo doll is?

Now, I know some of you were alive in the 60s.

I was born in the 70s and I remember the Bobo doll.

Although, to be fair, I didn't call it a Bobo doll.

I called it a little clown, rubber clown, plastic clown doll that was weighted at the very bottom and had a clown face and arms all picture drawn on it.

All right, we all know what the Bobo doll is.

The Bobo doll, it's this clown and it's weighted at the bottom and you punch it and it comes back up.

No matter how many times you punch it, it comes back up.

And so Albert Bandura conducted an experiment in 1961 at Stanford.

He took 36 boys and 36 little girls, little boys and little girls between the ages of 3 and 6.

By the way, all of these kids came from the preschool at Stanford University.

So note to self, if you have a child of preschool age and you don't want them to have psychological experiments done on them, don't put them at the preschool run by a major research university.

So 36 boys and 36 girls and they were separated into different groups And each child would spend some time in a room full of toys.

And at the center of all these toys was a Bobo doll.

And there would be an adult in that room with the child.

And in some rooms, for some children, the adult would play with the Bobo doll in a very nice, friendly, and kind way.

Talking to the Bobo doll, role playing with it, just being very kind and gentle and nice with the Bobo doll.

In other rooms, the adult would spend 10 minutes beating the Bobo doll, kicking the Bobo doll, throwing the Bobo doll across the room, cursing at the Bobo doll, using strong language, yelling, screaming at the Bobo doll.

And then what happened was after they had been in that room with that adult, either having a pleasant, nice play experience with the Bobo doll, or a rude, violent, malicious play experience with the Bobo doll, then the child was put in a separate room, also full of toys, also having a Bobo doll.

And then they just watched to see what would happen.

For the children who were in the nice play environment where the adult had been kind and gentle and pleasant to the Bobo doll, what do you think those children did?

They were nice, pleasant and gentle with the Bobo doll.

Now the children who were in the violent, offensive, aggressive play situation with the Bobo doll.

What do you think those children did when they were put into a room by themselves with a Bobo doll?

They did all of the same things that they had just observed.

In fact, you wonder why someone would pay good money to conduct an experiment like this.

But what's even stranger than that is the fact that until this experiment psychologists did not believe in this model of learning.

They did not believe in learning by observation.

They believed in learning by calculation.

That our brains are just wired in such a way that if we are faced with the same circumstances, we would all do the same things.

But clearly you had 2 populations of children who are in the same circumstance, meaning a room full of toys and a Bobo doll by themselves, yet you had 2 radically different outcomes.

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Beating Bobo

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