The situational claim

1. The claim: behaviour comes from other people and the social setting a person is in.
2. Two more situational factors sit here: culture on pro-social and anti-social behaviour, and authority figures on obedience.

Culture and authority figures

1. Culture on pro-social and anti-social behaviour
   1. A culture is the shared beliefs, values and customs a group passes on, and its norms tell you what helping is supposed to look like.
   2. Nobles (1976) argued that individualistic cultures, mostly Western ones, are built around personal goals and individual success.
   3. Chasing your own goals leaves less attention on what other people need, so pro-social behaviour is lower.
   4. Collectivist cultures put the needs of the group first, so sharing and helping are expected of everybody.
   5. A child raised inside that expectation learns pro-social behaviour as the ordinary way to act, which is how the culture passes it on.
   6. Whiting and Whiting (1975) observed 134 children aged 3 to 10 across six cultures and found the children in the less industrialised cultures were the most altruistic.
   7. Cultures vary inside themselves, and Nobles set American-Indian hospitality towards strangers against reports of extreme anti-social behaviour among the Ik.
   8. Anti-social behaviour runs on the same logic, because a culture that shrugs at low-level damage makes that damage more likely.
2. Authority figures on obedience
   1. An authority figure is someone you treat as having the right to tell you what to do.
   2. You judge that right from signals such as a uniform, a badge, a job title and the setting.
   3. A uniform that carries real social power, such as a guard's, gets orders followed, and a milkman's uniform carries little of that power.
   4. The setting adds to the signal, because an instruction given inside a hospital or a stadium borrows the weight of the place.
   5. Once you have read someone as holding that right, you carry the order out without weighing it up.
   6. Bickman (1974) gave the same orders through the same young men dressed as a guard, as a milkman and in ordinary clothes, and obedience varied with the outfit.

Changing the setting or the culture

1. The setting carries part of the weight: a steward's instruction about where to stand is obeyed inside the ground they are working in.
2. Change the culture and the same act reads differently: pushing straight to the front is unremarkable in some places and a serious breach of the norms here.

Criticisms

1. A strength: the theory rests on a field experiment with real pedestrians in a real street, so it has high ecological validity.
2. The charge: if the situation explains the behaviour, then the theory is deterministic.
3. What that amounts to: it implies that in a given situation people have no choice but to obey, conform or go along with the crowd.
4. The counter is free will: people choose their own actions, and behaving independently of a group is common.
5. Evidence for the counter: obedience in Bickman's study went up and down with the outfit, so the order on its own did not settle what people did.
6. The consequence: full determinism would remove personal responsibility, so nobody could be blamed for a harmful act carried out in a crowd or on an order.
7. A second weakness: the theory cannot explain why two people standing in the same place, hearing the same order, do different things.
8. Where that gap gets filled: dispositional factors explain that difference through personality.

Turning this into marks

1. When two situational factors are asked for, make culture and authority figures genuinely separate rather than one factor rephrased.
2. Name the signal or the norm that is doing the work, such as the guard's uniform or the expectation that neighbours help, because a general reference to the situation does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. The mark most often lost is stating the free will and determinism criticism without saying what it costs the theory, which is any account of why two people in the same setting act differently.