What situational factors are
Definition
Situational factor
A situational factor is something about the setting or circumstances a person is in, such as the presence of an authority figure, rather than their personality.
- Situational factors explain behaviour through other people and the social setting a person is in.
- Anyone in that spot: drop a different person into the same situation and they would behave much the same way.
- That gives you a test: change the situation and the behaviour should change with it, because the cause sits in the setting.
- There are four situational factors: majority influence, collective and crowd behaviour, culture, and authority figures.
Key Idea
- Situational means the cause sits outside the person, in the group or the setting.
- Dispositional means the cause sits inside the person, in their personality.
- This theory belongs to the social area of psychology, because the influence of groups is doing the explaining.
- Bickman (1974) is the study that puts a situational factor to the test, holding the person steady and changing only the uniform they wore.
Majority influence and crowd behaviour
Definition
Majority influence
When the view held by most people pulls others into line with it, so a behaviour spreads as people conform to the new norm.
- Majority influence on conformity
- You are exposed to the beliefs or behaviour of a group larger than yourself.
- Watching what most of them do tells you what counts as normal in that situation.
- Breaking that norm risks the group's disapproval, so you shift towards them.
- Compliance is the shallow outcome, a public change with private disagreement that stops once the group is gone.
- Internalisation is the deep outcome, where you accept the majority position and keep it when you are on your own.
- The larger the group, the stronger the pull.
- A united majority pulls harder, because a single ally is enough to make standing out bearable.
- An unclear situation pulls hardest of all, because the majority looks like good information when you do not know the answer.
- Collective and crowd behaviour, including deindividuation
- Le Bon (1895) argued that a person in a crowd becomes anonymous and takes on the collective mind of the crowd.
- The crowd supplies the anonymity, and that anonymity loosens the behaviour.
- Anti-social behaviour becomes more likely as a result, by way of deindividuation.
Example
- A new pupil joins a form group where nobody wears a coat outside, whatever the weather.
- Within a fortnight her coat stays in her bag.
- Moved to a school where everyone wears coats, she flips straight back to wearing hers.
- The situation is what changed her behaviour.
How deindividuation works
Definition
Deindividuation
Losing your sense of individual identity in a crowd, often because you feel anonymous, which can loosen your normal self-control.
- You join a crowd and become one face among thousands.
- Being one face among thousands makes you hard to identify, so personal responsibility is hard to pin on you.
- Your self-evaluation drops, so you stop measuring what you are doing against your own usual standards.
- Worry about how everyone else is judging you falls away too.
- The constraints and inhibitions that normally hold your behaviour in check weaken, because there is nobody left to enforce them on you.
- With those restraints weakened, you act on impulses you would usually hold back.
- Anything that deepens the anonymity deepens the effect: a bigger crowd, darkness, hoods or face coverings, and everybody dressed the same.
Common Mistake
- Deindividuation is situational, because the anonymity of the crowd causes it.
- It is not a dispositional factor, and it is not locus of control, which is the dispositional factor for crowds.
- Deindividuation lowers self-awareness, but people still know what they are doing.
- Deindividuation does not make violence certain, because it only raises the chance.
Applying both factors to one crowd
- A worked case: spectators spend four hours roaring encouragement at runners they have never met on the London Marathon route.
- Majority influence supplies the norm the crowd is already following, and deindividuation loosens the restraint that would hold you back from joining in.
Note
- Majority influence and crowd behaviour are two of the four situational factors, so culture and authority figures are covered in their own right elsewhere.
- Explaining behaviour through the situation does not mean the person had no choice, because people in the same crowd still walk away from it.
- Anonymity can loosen generous behaviour just as easily, so the marathon crowd is deindividuated too.
Turning this into marks
- When two situational factors are asked for, make majority influence and deindividuation genuinely separate rather than one factor rephrased.
- Name the detail in the situation that supplies the factor, such as the size of the united group or the hoods that made people anonymous, because a general description of a crowd does not secure the knowledge mark.
- The mark most often lost is naming deindividuation and then explaining it through the person's personality.
Self review
- What is a situational factor?
- Name three things that make majority influence stronger.
- Explain the difference between compliance and internalisation.
- Define deindividuation.
- Walk through the steps from joining a crowd to anti-social behaviour becoming more likely.
