What dispositional factors are

1. Dispositional factors explain behaviour through the person's own personality.
2. The claim: a trait you carry around with you makes one response more likely wherever you happen to be, and because personality is fairly stable the same person should behave similarly across many situations.
3. What it explains: why two people standing side by side, under identical pressure, do different things.

The four dispositional factors

1. Self-esteem on conformity
   1. Rogers described self-esteem as the gap between your self-concept, the person you think you are, and your ideal self, the person you would like to be.
   2. A wide gap means low self-esteem, and a narrow gap means high self-esteem.
   3. Low self-esteem leaves you with less confidence to hold your own line against a group.
   4. So you go along with the majority to be liked, which gives you compliance.
   5. Or you decide the majority must know better than you do, which can go as far as internalisation.
   6. High self-esteem makes the group's approval matter less, so you can disagree out loud and stay comfortable doing it.
2. Locus of control in crowds
   1. An internal locus of control means you believe what happens to you comes from your own effort and your own decisions.
   2. An external locus of control means you believe your behaviour is down to luck, fate and outside forces.
   3. Externals are more easily persuaded, so they are more likely to go along with crowd and collective behaviour.
3. Morality on pro-social and anti-social behaviour
   1. Moral reasoning is the thinking you do about the effect of an act on other people before you carry it out.
   2. Higher moral reasoning produces more pro-social behaviour and more resistance to a demand you believe is wrong.
   3. Hornsey et al. (2003) found that conformity dropped sharply when the act the majority was doing was immoral, such as cheating.
   4. Kohlberg (1969) reported that people with higher levels of moral reasoning were more likely to resist an authority figure telling them to do something harmful.
   5. Lower moral reasoning leaves the decision resting on what you can get away with, which makes anti-social behaviour more likely.
4. The authoritarian personality on obedience
   1. Adorno et al. (1950) described a personality with very high respect for authority, rigid beliefs and intolerance towards people seen as lower status.
   2. Someone who holds that those in charge should be respected and obeyed accepts an order at face value, so they carry it out without questioning it.

Locus of control in a crowd

1. The mechanism for an external: if you already believe outside forces run your behaviour, you have little reason to resist the pull of the people around you.
2. The mechanism for an internal: if you believe your choices are yours, you also own the consequences, so joining in looks like something you would have to answer for.
3. A worked case: when a few people start pulling at the barriers outside a town hall, the external in the crowd finds himself pulling too and the internal steps back onto the pavement.
4. Keep it apart from deindividuation: the crowd supplies the anonymity for everyone standing in it, and locus of control explains which of them then goes along with it.

The authoritarian personality and obedience

1. The traits travel with the person, so the authoritarian personality predicts higher obedience at school, at work and in the street.
2. The authoritarian personality is a cluster: submission to those above you, rigid thinking and hostility towards people seen as lower status travel together, and it is the whole cluster that raises obedience.
3. The evidence: NatCen (2011) found that decisions about joining the riots in Tottenham turned on what young people thought was right or wrong and on whether the benefits seemed to outweigh the risks.

Turning this into marks

1. When two dispositional factors are asked for, make them genuinely separate, so pair self-esteem with conformity and locus of control with crowds rather than describing one trait twice.
2. Name the trait and the behaviour it is paired with, because a general statement that personality matters does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. The mark most often lost is offering deindividuation or culture as a dispositional factor when both are situational.