Learning mechanisms were conflated with actual practice in the media-violence debate.

Evidence

Much of the controversy arose from failure to distinguish between research on how viewers learn by social modeling and whether they put into practice what they have learned. For reasons given earlier, tests for observational learning use simulated targets. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 891

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the crucial distinction between learning a behavior through modeling and choosing to perform it — the conceptual hinge of Bandura’s whole program that critics routinely blurred.