Learned Unsustainability: Bandura’s Bobo Doll Revisited

Introduction

This article explores the possibility of using the Bobo doll of Bandura’s experiments as a metaphor for learned (or more precisely—internalized mediators of) unsustainability (Bandura & Walters, 1963). In these experiments, Bandura would have a child playing in a room when an adult would enter the room and become aggressive with a blow-up Bobo doll. Later, when the child was left alone in the room with the Bobo doll, the aggressive adult behaviour witnessed by the child would generally be imitated. The child would often repeat much of the full repertoire of aggression, including hitting, kicking, punching and hammering the Bobo doll.

One way to think about unsustainability is as the sum total of various categories of these types of internalized cognitive, psychological and emotional mediators that guide human action into patterns of routinely practised, and thus culturally normalized and socially enforced, Self-destruction. ¹ This would seem, at least at first glance, to be a pressing educational issue. Yet, educational systems, as currently configured, are generally built upon conceptual theories and models of cognitive mediators disguised as ‘knowledge’ to be internalized by design. If education is really a separate class of activity, then that activity must have something to do with intentional ‘knowledge’ transmission and reception, or so it would seem. Therefore, this ‘knowledge’, and how it is presented, internalized and digested, becomes the primary if not exclusive focus of teachers and educational researchers, while other incidentally observed and imitated mediators are obscured and routinely ignored by these theories and models of education. However much of what is learned from education is incidental, some of it subconscious, for example, as non-linguistic emotional schemata to establish culturally correct emotional practices (Pekrun, 2009).

The usual sort of knowledge forming the object of educational research and deliberative practice has two main types: first, content based; and second, learning efficiency or process based. As an example of the first, consider proficiency with a supply–demand model, being able to recite a specific historical narrative or the ability to solve complex mathematical equations. These would be just a few examples of the primary, content-specific, bottom-line or ‘knowing what’ type of mediators routinely dealt with by educational theorists. From the contemporary educator’s perspective, the student’s practice and the products of that practice, whether of economics, mathematics, history or any other academic discipline, is either correct or incorrect. Either the student has the content and the ability to manipulate it, or does not have it. When done properly, the right answers are found and the wrong answers are recognized as being wrong. Bobo dolls work similarly as symbols. The doll becomes a symbol that triggers aggression; to recognize and react to it differently becomes a sort of incorrect answer. These products and practices are relatively easily evaluated and perhaps for that reason, they are not generally questioned outside of the specialized field of curriculum studies. Yet, this bottom-line view of knowledge, because it forms an important part of a taken-for-granted conventional wisdom, must also play some role in guiding human–landscape relations. The Bobo doll demonstrates a template of human behavioural development that many other behavioural categories fall into.

The other category of cognitive, psychological and emotional mediators, which contemporary educators and educational researchers pay relatively more attention to, belongs to the category of ‘learning efficiency’ or ‘knowing how’ mediators. These include self-regulation, self-efficacy and many others that focus on the process of learning or internalization as a culturally organized ‘practice’. The focus here is also on the transference of a particular form of ‘identity’. The Bobo doll, in other words, confers the identity of aggressor not by the content of the clown-faced object, but rather how that object is correctly or incorrectly put into practice. These mediators generally reinforce the conceptualization of education as a process of internalizing the specific knowledges that fit into our definition of the bottom-line type of mediators. They also often rely on a conceptualization of knowledge as something that is cumulatively growing. Here we find, again, mediators falling broadly within the templates supplied by the discipline of neo-classical economics and a Newtonian-style understanding of the way the world works. This conceptualization of an ever-increasing body of knowledge is usually also viewed as unproblematic, despite an increasing number of examples where less knowledge might have translated into increased human well-being (Beck, 1992; Orr, 2004) or where knowledge production actually involves the co-emergence of ignorance (Malewski & Jaramello, 2011).

Both of these types of mediators have their own style of hidden curricula. As Zerbavel (1997, p. 16) explains:

When a young boy returns with his mother from a long day downtown and hears her ‘official’ account of what they did and saw there, for example, he is getting a tacit lesson in what is considered relevant (and memorable) and irrelevant (and forgettable). Though it is only implicit, such a lesson is an important part of the process of learning how to attend, as well as how to remember, in a socially appropriate manner.

Like a shopping trip with a parent, a day in the classroom includes an intended and overt lesson plan as well as an implicit and subconscious lesson in the normalization of unsustainability (Winter & Cotton, 2012). In the construction of identity process, the classroom becomes just another part of life. Learning to identify foods as generic ‘product’, far removed from any hint of where, when and how it was actually grown, harvested and prepared, is only one example of the bottom-line type of unsustainability content. Learning to attend mainly to prices during the apprenticeship process, framing food as a commodity (an efficiency-based shopping experience), illustrates the transference of unsustainability as a process. Similar processes of human development occur both inside and outside of the classroom. The internalization of cultural tools never occurs in isolation, but rather forms the weft and warp that is woven from all available signs and symbols into a complex fabric of being, relating and becoming.

An important part of unsustainability learning involves the implicit way we learn to conceptualize knowledge. This takes place in the classroom the same way meaning systems and identities are constructed by listening to the official history of a shopping trip (Bandura, 2006). Making knowledge a thing, an object to be amassed like so many trophies, also tends to make it concrete, universal, final and not contingent. Treating knowledge this way must discourage students eventually from looking for blind spots, must dissuade playful thought and what Orr (2004) refers to as ‘slow knowledge’. To conceptualize the educational process as something to be maximized for efficiency dehumanizes the student in some sense, and reflexively the teacher as well. Or worse, changes the metaphor that structures our answer to the question, ‘what is a human?’, away from something that is almost mystically woven into an ethical and sacred community of becoming and into an object to be instrumentally improved before deliverance to the higher power of the labour market where an identity will be objectively assigned. These subtle shifts cannot be ignored if our true goal is to persist, and for future generations to persist, within a constellation that is worth preserving.

Sustainability Versus Unsustainability

These specific mediators are merely representative of complex systems of frames and metaphors, and other cultural tools that work to structure our thinking about the process of education. Barry raises a legitimate and critically important point about these systems for researchers, practitioners and theorists of education for sustainable development (ESD) that severely challenges taken-for-granted assumptions about learning and education. The foundational assumptions about how problems are to be dealt with may itself be constitutive of the sustainability challenge:

Think of the proliferation of the growing number of academic, government, NGO, and corporate documents about ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’. What would such documents contain if instead of being framed and focused around the future achievement of some understanding of sustainability, they were framed and focused around the reduction of unsustainability here and now instead? (Barry, 2012, p. 7)

Sustainability is clearly a growing buzzword within the broad project of education. It is generally considered as a technical problem to be solved or as a set of competencies to be mastered, something situated in the realm of rational thought, rather than an acquired set of cultural tools guiding rational thought but also emotional and psychological practices. How would changing the metaphor of sustainability to now focus on unsustainability impact the internalization of these cultural tools? Within the various conventional wisdoms and public narratives of sustainable development, there are basically two current schools of thought: one claims that the problem of sustainability resides primarily in a planet that is somehow inadequate (see Kurzweil [2005], Lynas [2011] or Noble [1999] for popular examples of this paradigm). The other school claims that the problem resides mainly in the dominant cultural coda: the myths, metaphors, frames, paradigms, languages, discourses, narratives, theories and other cognitive mediators of human action (Cronon [1983], Leopold [1952] or McKibben [2010] provide rough examples of this worldview). The reduction-of-unsustainability imperative outlined by Barry shifts the focus away from a potentially utopian, but really only imaginary, future harmony between human action and planetary boundaries and towards a much more practical and immediate approach, one that moves from a mechanistic to a more organic understanding of humans-in-landscapes. This perspective focuses implicitly on unsustainability as an issue of identity, the consequence of maladaptive cognitive, psychological and emotional mediators, rather than any presumed planetary inadequacy. Such a perspective would suggest that a reconfigured model of education must play a primary role for the project of eliminating unsustainability.

What does it mean then from this perspective to say that we live in a society that is unsustainable and that unsustainability should become an educational policy issue? The late Canadian philosopher George Grant (1969, p. 131) put it this way:

The tight circle then in which we live is this: our present forms of existence have sapped the ability to think about standards of excellence and yet at the same time have imposed on us a standard in terms of which the human good in monolithically asserted. Thus, the university curriculum, by the very studies it incorporates, guarantees that there should be no serious criticism of itself or of the society it is shaped to serve.

Bandura and Walters (1963, p. 47) was not considering this conundrum when he wrote: ‘Imitation plays an important role in the acquisition of the deviant, as well as of conforming, behaviour.’ Conforming and deviant have, in some sense, become at least partially synonymous within the contemporary context of ‘actually existing unsustainability’. Bandura’s point, however, is quite valid. Imitation plays a key role in the psychological, cognitive, emotional and even physiological development of identities. The infant, child and adult, each pay attention to what the caregiver, adult or peer is paying attention to and how that attention is distributed and practised. In modern cultures, the characteristics of objects receive more attention than the characteristics of relationships, for example. Those objects actually perform their role within a constellation of object/actor/context/action/story in the same general way Bandura’s Bobo dolls perform aggression in concert with all the other accompanying elements of the entire context (Wertsch, 1991, 1998, 2002). Within the parameters of human cognition and within the socio-cultural context of modern societies, the individual’s focus comes to be unfortunately placed on objects as independent billiard balls (Swentzell, 1997). These types of mediators enable history, economics or chemistry, for example, to pretend to be told from nowhere. Supply–demand models can ignore the role played by mothers reading bedtime stories to their children in the emergence and development of economic institutions. Management students are educated to ignore the future beyond the next fiscal quarter. Future teachers learn that examination answers are either correct or not correct, always and forever. And so on.

Any conscientious educator generally begins with, and further develops through practice, some metaphysical model of education in their mind. Their actions tend to be guided accordingly by that model. These ideas about the way education works form representations of the roles of teachers, relating in various ways to students and the teaching of something. Whether the process is conceptualized as occurring by conduit, transmission, internalization, scaffolding, proximal development, situated learning, apprenticeship, osmosis or any other useful model, it is important to point out that the model itself is part and parcel of a broader ‘already-existing unsustainability’ context (Barry, 2012). It is critically important for the project of ESD to recognize that any thinking about teaching or learning, or any of the many other aspects of contemporary education, can only occur within the much broader context of currently practised and structured unsustainability, emerging from and reinforced by the cultural tools routinely put into practice within contemporary constellations of object/actor/context/action/story relations. Unsustainability is clearly not deliberately written into the curriculum (Orr, 2002). Nevertheless, as White and Siegel (1984, p. 276) state, ‘Small children easily and effortlessly make their way out into the complex world of local society, entering and mastering hundreds of behaviour settings that have special requirements and special kinds of applicability,’ and these various competencies ultimately deliver unsustainability. Bandura’s Bobo doll thus provides a useful metaphor for the much more ubiquitous educational sociomateriality (Fenwick, Edwards & Sawchuk, 2011) of unsustainability.

Unsustainability Curricula

From an educational perspective, Bandura’s Bobo dolls, the objects, do not exactly correspond to a curriculum. They are a necessary but insufficient aspect of a curriculum. The curriculum of the Bobo doll might include a theory on subduing inflatable clown dolls or safety measures for pounding toys, the choreography of aggression and so on. The doll itself is like the canvas, a blank slate, to be used to paint the curriculum on top of. The doll becomes part of an organizing schema once it is put into practice. There is a correspondence between the curriculum and the organizing schemata of everyday life, but they are not the same and it is important to keep them conceptually separate. There is an ongoing debate, for example, about the role that neo-classical economics curriculum plays in the propagation of various social neuroses (Ferraro, Pfeffer & Sutton, 2005; Frank, Gilovich & Regan, 1993, 1996; Frank & Schulze, 2000; Yezer, Golfarb & Poppen, 1996). There is, I think, an aspect of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness involved in this discussion and debate (Latour, 2004). As Polanyi (2001, p. 74) pointed out repeatedly, ‘A market economy can exist only in a market society.’ What exactly constitutes a market society? Surely, it involves more than abstract theories covered in an educational curriculum. To begin with, where do these abstract theories come from? Could Adam Smith have penned his famous literary works in a very different socio-historical context? Smith, in fact, wove elements of an already existing discourse into a more complete narrative that would not have even resonated within another society a hundred years earlier or many other cultural communities of the world in Smith’s own time. Although it still seems normal in the early twenty-first century to frame such questions in terms of dependent and independent variables, the relationship between economic literature and economic behaviour is never so straightforward in practice (Ferraro et al., 2005).

Polanyi’s (2001, p. 75) words continue to enlighten:

But labour and land are no other than the human beings themselves of which every society consists and the natural surroundings in which it exists. To include them in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market.

However, labour and land are always perceived and understood through a process of ‘apprenticeship’ and ‘situated learning’ (Lave, 2011; Lave & Wenger, 1991) whereby people and places become like commodities. These very specific frames and metaphors work their way into a complex web of meaning. So, at one level, ‘…libertarian conservatives (who believed strongly in the power of markets, individual self-reliance, and human rationality) were least likely to be disturbed by trade-offs between making money and harming people’ (Ferraro et al., 2005, p. 15). At another level, ‘the metaphors and linguistic tropes used in a discipline coalesce into a more or less coherent knowledge structure that shapes how its members and those they influence construe reality’ (ibid., p. 15). Both these levels of connectivity between the body of economics knowledge and group identities and behaviours are also held together by individual and collective objects that are understood and put into practice as commodities, from food, land and labour to inventions and poetry (Appadurai, 1986, pp. 3–63; Miller, 2005, p. 1–50). In this respect, the ideas, the frames, metaphors and so on bleed from the textbooks and discourses of economics into the everyday way of being in the world. As Meikle (2001, p. 51) explains:

Aristotle’s worry is that commerce and its values could penetrate into all the activities that make up the life of the polis or society, corrupting them, causing a confusion of ends which would make it difficult for the community to order its activities properly, and obscuring any clear view of the end or point of social living, of what it is to live well.

It also travels in the other direction, though. Latour’s (2004) ‘epistemology police’, including authors of economic dogma, draw inspiration and ideas from the world as they find it and use the cultural tools available to them to interpret that world. Today, that process involves unsustainability Bobo dolls (UBDs) like economic knowledge and commoditized everything, as they work to anchor epistemologies of unsustainability by being put into practice according to the mythologies of unsustainability.

Unsustainability Bobo Dolls

It should be clear by now then that initiates into contemporary global culture are surrounded by myriads of UBDs. In fact, in the world of unsustainability, we even come to embody and enact ourselves as UBDs. Many of these UBDs are potentially as harmless as an actual Bobo doll. Bandura’s Bobo doll itself had no intrinsic aggressiveness embedded within the inflatable, clown-faced object. As with unsustainability, the locus of maladaptation is the mediator that works to frame and enact the UBD within a constellation of object/actor/context/action/story. The Bobo doll becomes a cultural tool used for the enactment of almost ritualistic aggression, but it is first encountered as a sign that constitutes a particular form of mediated action. In fact, the actual object—Bobo doll, stick representing a horse or a knot in handkerchief, for example—is of secondary importance to the psychological development of the child (Vygotsky, 1978). The primary factor is the way the object functions as a sign or a symbol. What changes or develops within the object/actor/context/action/story matrix is the form of relationship between child and object within given contextual parameters. This relationship shows up in the psychological development of the initiate but it is not confined to their insides. In the same way, a stick becomes a horse for a child, a mowed lawn becomes a talisman of security and mastery for the culturally correct but ecologically neurotic. As Vygotsky (1978, p. 55) reminds us, ‘The mastering of nature and the mastering of behaviour are mutually linked, just as man’s [sic] alteration of nature alters man’s own nature.’ The entire constellation suffers the effects of UBDs.

These UBDs are interlocked with other UBDs, whereby a mowed lawn functions as part of a neo-liberal economics education. Robbins (2012, p. 135) explains:

To examine this flow of power and chemicals is to begin to shed light on the active role of nonhumans in capitalized ecosystems. And these many nonhumans—including plants, animals, technical equipment, and infrastructure—all act in different (and potentially contradictory) ways to produce the ‘subject’ we recognize as ourselves.

Many common school objects act in this way as UBDs. They do not, again, have the curriculum embedded in them—they become UBDs by the way they are attended to, ignored, framed and put into a practice of unsustainability within social groups. Unsustainability is embedded in the school building when that building has been designed instrumentally with the sole intended purpose of facilitating the production of high-value products for a labour market, when the ecological history of the place is erased by design or when the control and head counting of children takes priority over potentialities of encountering place as a wonder capable of constituting sustainability peoples, and when all of these very cultural peculiarities come to seem ‘normal’ to the social group (Upitis, 2010).

The chalk used on the blackboard is barely given a second thought. It is framed as an object having only instrumental use value. Yet, the same chalk has been formed over millions of years from the bodies of ancient coccolithophores. These tiny creatures would have contained deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that could speak the same language as our own DNA. We know this now because it is possible to take a gene from a codfish and put it into a strawberry and the codfish gene can speak to the proteins in the strawberry, telling them not to freeze even if the temperature falls below 0^o Celsius. We could, then, objectively frame the chalk as our own ancient relative, rather than a mere commodity. Fences, desks, chairs, teachers and communities could all undergo similar transformations, allowing new Bobo doll constellations to emerge. These new constellations would be woven together with new discourses, just as they always are: ‘For in the last analysis, men [sic] do not communicate by a neutral vocabulary. In the profoundest human sense, one communicates by a weighted vocabulary in which the weightings are shared by the group as a whole’ (Burke, 1984, p. 162).

Recommendations

Fisher (2013, p. 161) makes a nice summary of the never-neutral ground we have covered so far: ‘…our society is not structured to care for life, to attend carefully to relationships and honour the growth or sacred unfolding of things. To be “successful” in today’s society, one does not serve nature but rather the expansion of capital.’ Fisher speaks to the myriad forms of unsustainability that we witness consciously and unconsciously on a daily basis, in and out of the classroom. As we become increasingly aware of the UBDs around us, the possibility of tracing those same UBDs into our own identities begins to open up: ‘The person has been correspondingly transformed into a practitioner, a new-comer becoming an old-timer, whose changing knowledge, skill, and discourse are part of a developing identity—in short, a member of a community of practice’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 122).

Being a ‘member of a community of practice’, reflexively engaged in the co-constitution of each other, actually opens up some possibilities for transformational change. Those possibilities begin by recognizing our Bobo dolls as Bobo dolls, and not as symbols to trigger aggression or unsustainability. Many of these UBDs are deeply internalized, even beyond conscious awareness, so the task will not be an easy one. Fortunately, our Bobo dolls are all woven together so that if we can figure out which are the best strings to pull on, the whole of unsustainability may begin to unravel.

This promise of transformational change might involve, first, questioning and then challenging the social construction of objectivity in the form of propositional knowledge. According to Tsoukas (2005, p. 80), ‘The impossibility of guiding practical action in organized contexts by rules alone underlines the gnosiological indispensability of examples, anecdotes, and stories (in short: narratives) for stating what rules cannot state.’ Putting more emphasis on narrative forms of knowledge and less on propositional forms might be like explaining to children that the Bobo doll does not have to be used as a punching bag. There are other ways to interpret the meaning of a Bobo doll. Such a process might seem like telling children that there is no Santa Claus and in a way, it is exactly that. Supply and demand has no magic (Bateson, 1972; Bateson & Bateson, 1987). There is no such thing as a ‘free’ market because somebody always has to enforce the rules. The mythic market does not need to trigger blind reverence and submission. It is only a symbol—a map and not a territory. Students can be ‘Left Behind’ by the Judas goat that would transform them into marketable commodities. Knowing what and knowing how could become practices based on maps of recursion and reflexivity, rather than maps of machines. These new maps could be expected, over time, to generate new and less unsustainable territories (Bruner, 1986). However, before we make this all sound just too simple, we would do well to consider Grant’s (1969, p. 143) warning:

Despite the noblest modern thought, which teaches always the exaltation of potentiality above all that is, has anyone been able to show us conclusively throughout a comprehensive account of both the human and non-human things, that we must discard the idea of a presence above which potentiality cannot be exalted? In such a situation of uncertainty, it would be lacking in courage to turn one’s face to the wall, even if one can find no fulfillment in working for or celebrating the dynamo. Equally it would be immoderate and uncourageous and perhaps unwise to live in the midst of our present drive, merely working in it and celebrating it, and not also listening or watching or simply waiting for intimations of deprival which might lead us to see the beautiful as the image, in the world, of the good.

Conclusion

Our hope is that this article has unsettled some of the relationships the readers have with their own UBDs. Part of that unsettling should arise from a recognition that there is no one to blame for our UBDs. As humans, we naturally internalize the cultural tools available to us. The quest for sustainability should not waste more time looking for someone or something to blame and punish. Hopefully, the shift of attention to unsustainability can avoid that fruitless distraction altogether. By conceptually extracting evildoers from our world, we necessarily bring increasing complexity into focus. This increasing complexity calls into question the comforting simplicity of our contemporary true or not true worldview. We would like to suggest, in conclusion, that the discomfort this brings about may in fact be healthy. Recent research supports the correlation between ‘nature relatedness and happiness’ (Zelinski & Nisbet, 2014). Given the correlation between internalized cultural tools and our connectivity with the world around us, it follows that knowledge systems that promote connectivity (including narrative-based as opposed to exclusive reliance on propositional forms of knowledge) may be healthier for individuals and societies generally. This hypothesis requires further research but may point us to an interesting sustainability pathway to be explored.