Essay on “Live & Learn” The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Resource Description

“You live and learn. At any rate, you live,” said Douglas Adams. In other words, he is saying that you are going to live anyway, so make life worth it by learning. Most people learn how to do things or how to act in certain situations by direct experiences, but given a human’s short lifespan, it is unlikely that a person will learn everything by experience. There is no doubt that direct experience is one of the best ways of learning, but it is impossible to experience everything first hand. This is where vicarious learning comes in; through which people learn simply by observing and modelling. This should not sound new to anyone because people have always been learning implicitly, they just never realised it. Then imagine how much people will be able to learn if they started to observe actively. So, let’s find out how observational learning occurs.

Albert Bandura, a renowned psychologist from Stanford University, wrote, “In the social learning system, new patterns of behaviour can be acquired through direct experience or by observing the behaviour of others.” Learning by direct experience literally means to learn by trial and error, which is the most familiar way of learning. On the other hand, implicit learning occurs when someone enlightens himself by observing someone else’s action and its consequences. Bandura further explains that there are four steps to learning implicitly: attention, retention, reproduction and motivation. First, a person must pay attention to the model’s behaviour. Then, one must retain the model’s behaviour and have the necessary skills at one’s disposal. Finally, a person must be motivated to practice the behaviour and activate it into overt performance in order to learn implicitly. With these steps, Bandura claims, “virtually all learning phenomena resulting from direct experiences can occur on a vicarious basis.” The famous “Bobo Doll Experiment” conducted by Albert Bandura clearly shows that behaviours can be learned through observation. Commenting on the experiment, Bandura explains:

The model pummelled the doll with a mullet, lunged it in the air, kicked it repeatedly, and threw it down and beat it. Exposure to aggressive modelling increased attraction to guns even though it was never modelled. The guns had less appeal to children who had no exposure to aggressive modelling. The children also picked up the hostile language. The children in the control group, who had no exposure to the aggressive modelling never exhibited the novel forms of aggression. (Bandura, 1961) From the experiment, Bandura shows how far just watching other people influenced someone’s behaviour. The experiment involved children who were left to watch an adult model beat up the bobo doll, and every child exposed to an aggressive model reproduced the violent behaviour, especially when the model was of the same sex; boys copied male models and girls copied female models. Those who watched adults play gentle with the doll never showed any aggression. Simply put, children did what they saw; children learned a new behaviour implicitly. A germane example of this can also be found in Mark Haddon’s celebrated book, “The curious incident of the dog in the night-time” (2004).

In Haddon’s novel, Christopher, the protagonist, shows both types of learning as he investigates the death of a poodle named Wellington. Christopher admires Sherlock Holmes, and he himself sets out to investigate who killed the dog. However, Christopher is a boy with “special needs”, suffering from mild autism and has trouble socialising. An excellent example of Christopher’s social incompetence is shown when Christopher explains that his mother is dead, to which he seems to be quite indifferent. Christopher obviously cares for his mother, as he wants to bring in meals for her and send her a get-well card when he hears that she is hospitalised. However, when he hears the news of his mother’s death, he diverts to discussing mundane details about heart attacks, and not a word is said about his feelings and emotions. For instance, throughout the book Christopher never talks about his mother’s absence from the household and the influence it had on him and his father. Instead, when his mother died, Christopher simply re-recorded his life, giving no roles for his mother to play in it in order to cope with the loss.