Situational Effects on Human Behaviour
“He’s usually pretty quiet, but when he’s with his friends, he talks a lot.” In fact, people say things like this all the time. Behavior is the way a person acts or behaves, especially toward other people (Oxford University Press, 2014). So what exactly makes people act the way they do? Is it a person’s attitude or the situation in which they find themselves? This essay will make a case for the idea that people’s actions are mostly determined by the situations they’re in.
Coon and Mitterer (2012) say that situational determinants are outside factors that have a strong effect on behavior. There are a few main types of situational factors. Biological environmental factors are the first type. People’s natural needs and abilities should not be confused with these things. Instead, they are made up of physical reflexes, needs, motivation, taxes, the ability to feel pleasure and pain, and how unstable these things are. Biological factors rarely explain any behavior that can be seen, though. They are usually shaped by what we call cultural tendencies, which are the different ways different groups of people learn. Different cultures have different customs, rules about how to act, and practices (Myers, 2015). When we’re with people from a different culture, how we act depends on these different norms. For example, you might not use utensils when eating with a Hindu to show respect for their culture. Instead, you might eat with your hands. Situational factors are also important in determining behavior, but they are less easy to generalize. These things have a big impact on how people act. There are personal situations, social situations, and situations that don’t involve other people. Non-social situations have to do with a person’s physical surroundings. Social situations have to do with the number, culture, personalities, and mental states of the people around the person. Personal situations have to do with the person’s own state of mind at a given time (Gastil, 1961). All of these situational factors work together to determine how a person acts.
The Milgram’s study is a well-known (or infamous) example of how the situation affects how people act. If you were asked to give an innocent stranger a high-voltage electric shock, would you do it? Anyone with a clear head would probably say no. But in Milgram’s experiment, the people who took part were told to give shocks ranging from 15 to 450 volts to the learner when the learner, who was working for the experimenter, gave the wrong answers to the questions. About 65% of the people who took part went all the way to 450 volts after the experimenter, who was pretending to be a scientist doing a study, pushed them to do so. In talking about this experiment, it was said that the participants’ actions were due to the fact that people obey authority. In this case, the authority was the experimenter, who pushed the participants to keep going. This is a social situational factor because the authority figure affected how the participants behaved. Milgram then changed the social conditions in the experiment, such as the closeness and legitimacy of the experimenter, to show that the participants’ actions were also caused by social factors. The rate of compliance ranged from 0% to 93%. (Myers, 2015). So, from this experiment, we can see that situations have a big impact on how people act.
Bystander apathy is another effect of situational factors on behavior that has been studied a lot. This is when someone doesn’t help in an emergency when there are other people around (Myers, 2015). In the case of the murder of Kitty Genovese, this effect was brought to light. She was attacked in her home, and even though 38 of her neighbors came to see what was going on after hearing her screams, none of them helped her in the half hour it took to kill her. In an experiment done by Latane and Darley in 1969, the participants heard a woman who had led them into the room fall and hurt her ankle while they were alone, with a friend, with a stranger, or with a passive confederate. People who heard the woman fall offered to help her 70% of the time when they were alone, 70% of the time when they were with a friend, and 13% of the time when they were with a stranger. Only 7% of the time when they were with a passive confederate did they help. This big difference in results shows how much a social situation can change whether or not we want to help.
One could say that a person’s attitude could also affect how they act, since attitude is made up of thoughts and feelings that can change how we react (Myers, 2015). Sure, if we think something is dangerous, like smoking, we might not like it and act against people who do it. But most of the time, a person’s feelings don’t force them to act on them. A study by LaPiere shows this to be true (1934). Only one of the 66 places that offer lodging turned away a group of Chinese people, even though most Americans don’t like Chinese people and the owners said they would turn the Chinese people away. Self-described attitudes can’t explain much of the difference in how people act in real life. Further studies showed that attitudes do affect behavior, but not as much as situational factors, and that they work best when certain conditions are met: when other factors that affect our actions are small, when the attitude is clearly linked to the behavior, and if our attitudes are strong enough to make us want to change (Myers, 2015). If these things are true, we are more likely to do what we believe in. But since it’s unlikely that so many factors will come together, it’s more likely that situations will play a bigger role in how people act. Also, Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory from 1959 says that it is possible for behavior to change how people think. Under the guise of an experiment, the person who took part in the study had to do a bunch of boring and repetitive tasks. The person was then paid to convince the next person to do the same experiment by making it sound like a good idea. After that, the first participant was asked to rate the experiment on how interesting it was and whether or not he or she would want to do it again. On average, the people who took part in the experiment liked it about 1.8 points more than the people in the control group, who were not told to try to convince another person to take part. People feel uncomfortable when their thoughts and actions don’t match up. When this happens, they are likely to change their thoughts to match their actions to get rid of the problem.
Attitude does have a small effect on behavior, but how we act can also change our attitudes. On the other hand, as many studies have shown, situations have a big impact on how people act. So, this essay comes to the conclusion that a lot of what people do depends on what’s going on around them.
References
Coon, D., & Mitterer, J. O. (2012). Getting started with psychology. Wadsworth and Cengage Learning in the United States.
Festinger, L. & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). (1959). Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203- 210.
Gastil, R. D. (1961). The Determinants of Human Behaviour. American Anthropologist, 63(6), 1281-1291.
LaPiere, R. T. (1934). Attitudes vs. Actions. Social Forces, 13, 230- 237.
Latane, B. & Darley, J. M. (1969). (1969). Bystander “Apathy”. American Scientist, 57(2). (2).
Myers, D. G. (2015). (2015). Exploring Social Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill Education.
Oxford University Press. (2014). (2014). Definition of Behaviour in English. In Oxford Dictionaries. Retrieved from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/behaviour
Zimbardo, P. G., Maslach, C., & Haney, C. (2000). (2000). Reflections on the Stanford Prison
Experiment: Genesis, transformations, consequences. In T. Blass (Ed.), Obedience to authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram paradigm. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum.
