Mark Dixon Summary

 Albert Bandura

• In the book, the Bandura chapter appears under “Media modelling effects / Audience” — as one of the core audience theories.  
• The chapter emphasises that Bandura’s work challenged older ideas that human behaviour was fixed by innate traits or purely biological impulses. Instead, behaviour is shaped significantly by our environment — especially the human/social environment.  
• The principle drawn from Bandura is: people (especially children) learn not only through direct reinforcement but by observing others — watching models, imitating their behaviour, and internalising actions.  
• A key example: the Bobo doll experiment, which demonstrated that children exposed to an adult model behaving aggressively were later more likely to imitate that aggression — even without direct reward or punishment.  
•  In media context: this theory supports the idea that media — films, TV, online content — can influence audience behaviour: repeated exposure to certain behaviours or roles may lead people (especially youth) to model what they observe. Dixon uses Bandura’s theory to explain “media modelling effects