Individual/ situational explanations Flashcards
What is this debate about?
Whether a persons behaviour is a result of their own personality or the context they are in
Situational explanations
Suggests that behaviour is best explained by the situation and circumstance someone is in: someone’s social or physical environment
Most extreme shows people will act the same in a given situation as the situation is only what changes behaviour
Individual explanations
Behaviour is a result of someone’s internal characteristics: their biology, personality, development (personal experience), cognitive processes
At most extreme this shows a persons behaviour is unchanging whatever situation they’re in
Strengths of situational explanations
Has practical applications in research where psychologists can manipulate situations in a controlled environment to change Ps behaviour
Also allows generalisations to whole population that a certain situational factor is the cause of a certain behaviour
Supported by evidence where people are influenced by situations they’re in
Weaknesses of situational explanations
Could be used as an excuse to explain away bad behaviour (eg x made me do it) so neg applications
Ignores differences people show in the same situation eg anomalies and individual differences in genetics
Individual differences across people are ignored
Strengths of individual explanations
Supported by idea of individual differences in genetics and anomalies in experiments where someone behaves differently despite a situational factor
Could be useful by placing people in certain jobs
Holds people accountable for their behaviour by placing responsibility on the individual
Weaknesses of individual explanations
Makes it difficult to predict how people behave in given situations so we cannot manipulate a situational factor in an experiment to measure its effect (fewer applications)
Makes generalisations to the whole population difficult if we can’t say a certain situational factor will affect behaviour
Examples of studies that support situational side of the debate
Milgram - individually participants didn’t want to deliver shocks but due to situation (Yale, the experimenter, prods) they did
Bandura - children acted aggressively to bobo doll due to the situation they were put in to observe an aggressive role model and therefore learnt this behaviour
Examples of studies that support the individual side of the debate
Casey - internal differences such as being a high delayer/low delayer of gratification (thus performance on the hot go/no go task) are caused by differences in brain activity (hot and cold regions) these are due to someone’s individual biology
Hancock - internal factor eg disorder of psychopathy is the cause of different language used, eg using more disfluencies and past tense
