We The People Will Be the Positive Role Models That Trump Never Could Be

Donald Trump is not only mean and vindictive in his goal of inflicting pain and humiliation on others, but for Trump, he actually derives pleasure in the ways he treats people. Like most bullies, Trump enjoys the hurt he causes. And this is the very definition of a “sadist.”

The long list of orders and policies Trump has signed can be classified as “sadistic.” These have little or nothing to do with supporting of serving the country and include, but certainly are not limited to:

• Separating young children from their parents and locking them in dehumanizing cages, some of whom have not been returned with their families to this day.
• Blaming President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukrainians for instigating the war with Russia and referring to Zelenskyy as “a dictator without elections.”
• Lodging humiliating names on his political opponents and detractors like Marco Rubio as “Little Marco,” Rosie O’Donnell as “a fat pig,” Ron DeSantis as “Ron DeSanctimonious,” Hillary Clinton as “crooked Hillary,” Adam Schiff as “Shifty Schiff,” and calling our military personnel who gave the ultimate sacrifice to their country as “suckers and losers.”
• Nominating the most visible and highly disqualified people to head important governmental offices such as the Departments of Health and Human Service, Education, Intelligence, Defense, FBI, and others as if Trump wishes to give a slap to the face of the government itself.
• Attacking transgender people in every way including attempting to erase their very existence.
• Signing orders to enrage those who are interested in saving the planet from human destruction.
• Randomly renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” and threatening to retake the Panama Canal, incorporate Canada and Greenland into the United States, and “owning” the Gaza Strip.

With Trump’s obvious “sadistic” words and actions, we are seeing what has come to be known as “The Trump Effect” in which through Donald Trump’s derisive and abusive words and actions, many people, including young people, are given permission to mirror his behavior and react similarly against others. Adults likewise see the President’s behavior as justification of their own mean spirited and uncivil actions.

Youth through their socialization learn the values and attitudes of people and later of the larger society. Within this process, youth also learn prejudices and how to discriminate through observing others around them.

Young people begin developing attitudes about various groups in society as early as ages three or four. Initially, such attitudes are quite flexible. However, as people grow older, such attitudes become more ingrained and difficult to change.

Social Learning Theory

Social Learning Theory, sometimes referred to as “Social Cognition Theory,” proposes that individuals learn by observing and associating with others (modeling), and through the process of reinforcement, one’s beliefs and actions are in some way supported by others.

The developmental and educational psychologist, Albert Bandura, proposed that young people learn primarily through observation and that one’s culture transmits social mores and what he called “complex competencies” through social modeling. As he noted, the root meaning of the word “teach” is “to show.”

Bandura asserted that the process of modeling alone — free from social reinforcements — can, in fact, be enough for young people to incorporate and act on their own beliefs and behaviors.

Bandura posited that positive modeling by knowledgeable or advanced peers and classmates can develop even higher efficiency and cognitive developmental competencies than teachers modeling the same activities.

Society at large, adults, and peers present an array of modeling, a continuum from very productive and affirming to very biased, aggressive, and destructive. Modeling to Bandura included much more than simple observation of concrete actions followed by imitation (“response mimicry”) but also included what he called “abstract modeling” of such abstract concepts as following rules, taking on certain values and beliefs, and making moral and ethical judgments.

On the negative side of the modeling continuum, for example, Bandura concluded that young people acted out aggression modeled by adults in their homes. This finding contradicted the premise that parental/guardian punishment would inhibit young people’s aggressive behaviors.

To test his hypothesis that social modeling had a primary impact on children’s learning and on their behaviors and beliefs, Bandura and his associates developed their “Bobo Doll” experiments. The purpose was to determine whether adult modeling resulted in either aggressive or non-aggressive behaviors by the young children in the study.

Research participants included 36 boys and 36 girls, with a control group of 24 children. The participants ranged in age from 3 to 6 years, with an average age of 4 years and 4 months, all from the Stanford University Nursery School. The researchers investigated and were knowledgeable about each participant’s prior behavioral history, and this was factored into the final data analysis.

Each young person was taken individually into a playroom filled with a variety of “non-aggressive toys” including a tinker toy set, and “aggressive toys” including a wooden mallet and a Bobo Doll: a large inflatable clown, weighted on the bottom so it could stand unaided, approximately the size of a pre-adolescent child of 5 feet.

The experimenter told each young participant that the toys were only for the adult model to play with, and that the young person was to watch the adult. The young people in the control group, however, were each told individually that they could play with the toys. No adult model was to enter their playroom.

For half of the participants, the adult model initially played with the tinker toys for one minute, then for nine minutes, attacked the Bobo doll with a sequence of verbal insults and physical violence including kicking, punching, and hitting about the head with the wooden mallet.

For the other half of the participants, the adult model played with the tinker toys and ignored the Bobo doll for the entire 10-minute duration of this phase of the experiment. Following their observations, each young person was taken individually by the experimenter into another playroom with an assortment of toys, which included an airplane, a fire engine, a doll set with clothes and carriage, and others.

To instill a certain degree of anger and frustration, the experimenter told each young person that they could play with the toys in this room for a very short time, and that these toys were reserved for other children.

The young participants were then taken individually to a third playroom and left alone for 20 minutes to play with aggressive and non-aggressive toys. The aggressive toys included the Bobo doll, a wooden mallet, two dart guns, a tetherball with a face painted on it, and others.

Among the non-aggressive toys were paper and crayons, a tea set, two dolls, a ball, cars and trucks, and plastic farm animals. Experimenters observed each child behind a one-way mirror and evaluated their behaviors on a series of specific measures of aggressive behavior.

Bandura found that the youth who observed the aggressive adult model were much more likely to exhibit both imitative physical and verbal aggressive behaviors when left alone in the third playroom, as opposed to youth who were exposed to the non-aggressive model or no model.

In addition, Bandura’s initial assumption that youth were more highly influenced by same-sex models was validated. Both the males and the females exhibited higher degrees of aggressive verbal and physical behaviors following modeling by a same-sex experimenter than by an experimenter of the other sex. Finally, overall, males tended to behave more aggressively than females in the study.

Bandura and his associates succeeded in supporting their theory of social learning. Young people, they found, can indeed learn specific behaviors, such as forms of verbal and physical aggression, by observing and imitating others. This was found to be true even in the absence of behavioral reinforcements.

Bandura concluded that youth are highly influenced by observing adult behavior, leading them to believe that such behavior is acceptable, and, in this instance, freeing their own aggressive inhibitions. They are then more likely to behave aggressively in future situations.

Trump’s “Modeling” Behaviors

With Social Learning Theory as our conceptual organizer, what can we surmise are the lessons Donald Trump is teaching youth and adults alike either by design or through “The Trump Effect”?

A 17-year-old high school student expressed to me recently that if anyone in their school acted like Donald Trump, they would immediately be sent home and ultimately expelled from that school.

Donald Trump, in his words and behavior as his wooden mallet, treats people as if they were his personal Bobo Dolls, and thereby, he represents a negative role model to all youth and adults alike.

But as more and more of us stand up, speak out, and interrupt his sadistic, sociopathological, and narcissistic behaviors, collectively we will disarm him, take the mallet from his hand, and model for our youth that his words and actions in all their forms are inappropriate and counterproductive in a just society.

People who counteract Trump’s teachings will become those whom Albert Bandura viewed as positive teachers by example.

Eventually, we will send Trump home and expel him from our politics. We will exemplify the character and characteristics of positive role models and get our country back on track to become the more perfect union we have been searching for and working for over the past 250ish years.