Instead, Milgram found that his subjects, all Americans, mostly obeyed situational pressures to be cruel. If Americans resisted the demand to obey, but Germans obeyed, it might support the dispositional perspective. Stanley Milgram, who conducted the obedience research, apparently wanted to see if the "German character" encouraged obedience, which would be predicted by dispositionism. Situations can override individual dispositions. By contrast, a "situationist" perspective emphasizes the power of the environment. the belief that people would all lie, cheat or steal if given the opportunityĪ need for strong leadership which displays uncompromising power (etc)ĭispositions come from inside, presumably put there mostly by education and culture (or biology). Respect for submission to acknowledged authorityīelief in aggression toward those who do not subscribe to conventional thinking, or who are differentĪ negative view of people in general - i.e. The authoritarian personality was said to be a personality type with dispositions like these:īlind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong In Chapter 11 we saw how American social psychologists and personality psychologists invented the concept of authoritarian personality to explain Nazi behavior. (Disposition is a lasting personality orientation such as "temperament, character, nature, constitution, makeup, or mentality.") A dispositionist believes individual traits or personality characteristics usually determine behaviors. We encountered this distinction in discussing Walter Mischel's famous criticism of the trait concept, in Chapter 11 (Personality).Ī situationist believes environments and situations elicit certain behaviors. The situationist vs dispositionist controversy was at the heart of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo did this to prove that situations, rather than personal traits (dispositions), ruled behavior. In 1971, social psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment that showed violent and aggressive behavior could be elicited from college students simply by asking them to play the role of prison guards.
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