became more psychologically distressed than other patients as the disease
progressed (Danoff-Burg, Revenson, Trudeau, & Paget, 2004). One team of re-searchers looked at how teenagers responded to being diagnosed with diabetes,
a disease that requires a good deal of personal monitoring and treatment
(Helgeson, Escobar, Siminerio, & Becker, 2007). High levels of unmitigated
communion predicted more depression and higher anxiety among these adoles-
cents one year after the diagnosis. In short, being compassionate and nurturing
is a good thing, but on occasion people need to devote some of that nurturing tothemselves.
OBSERVATIONAL LEARN ING OF AGGRESSION
On May 25, 2009, a 17-year-old set off a bomb outside a ManhattanStarbucks. When arrested weeks later, the boy confessed to plans for a seriesof similar attacks. He explained he was just imitating Brad Pitt ’s character
in his favorite movie, Fight Club . The incident was just the latest in a long
string of violent crimes linked to violence in a motion picture. The list goesback many years, and many of the examples on that list have ended in trag-
edy. In December 1997 a 14-year-old boy entered his Kentucky high school
carrying five guns. The boy opened fire on classmates who had gathered fora prayer meeting, and three students were killed. Later the boy said he was
acting out a scene from the movie The Basketball Diaries. In July 1991 the
motion picture Boyz ’nt h eH o o d opened around the country. Although
calm was the norm at most of the theaters, some became the setting forreal-life violence, including severa l shootings. Thirty-five people were
reported wounded or injured the first night the movie was shown. A man
in Chicago was killed. In May 1981 John Hinckley tried to assassinate
President Ronald Reagan. Investigator s soon discovered that Hinckley had
viewed the motion picture Taxi Driver several times before the shooting.
The film portrays a man who falls in love with a young prostitute, playedby Jodie Foster, and who later attempts to shoot a presidential candidate.
The subsequent investigation uncover ed that Hinckley also had a strong at-
traction to Jodie Foster.
These incidents are painful examples of one of the most widely re-
searched aspects of Bandura ’s social-cognitive theory, the relationship
between modeled aggression and performed aggression. Studies not only
demonstrate how people often learn behaviors through observing models,
but the findings also raise some impo rtant questions about the portrayal of
violence in the mass media.
Bandura ’s Four-Step Model
As you will see, decades of research demonstrate that people exposed to ag-
gressive models sometimes imitate the aggressive behavior. Before reviewingsome of that research, an observation is in order. Anyone who watches televi-
sion or goes to an occasional movie (which is just about all of us) undoubtedly
has seen some murders, beatings, shootings, and the like. Yet rarely do we step386 CHAPTER 14 The Behavioral/Social Learning Approach