Individual Vs Situational

Question 1

What is a situational explanation?

Answer 1

D= individuals are influenced by situations and do not behave in the same way in different situations 
I= reductionist
A= social, behaviourist 
M= field experiments

Question 2

2 pieces of research that support situational explanation

Answer 2

• Milgram= prestigious UNI, lab coat, paid, random assignment of teacher
• Piliavin= race/type of victim, impact of model and impact of amount of people, cost-reward analysis
• Watson+Rayner= association of rat and loud sound caused phobia
• Wilkstrom+Tafel= disadvantaged neighbourhoods cause criminality

Question 3

2 pieces of research supporting individual explanations

Answer 3

• Sperry= due to corpus callosum being severed coz of epilepsy
• Freud= Little Hans phobia stemmed from individual being in phallic stage
• Wender= genetic cause of depression
• Wilson&Daly= gender as a cause of crime
• Bruner= genetics as a cause of crime

Question 4

Pros and cons of situational explanations?

Answer 4

Pros:
•offer many practical applications (Bandura: study of aggression)
•field experiments= high ecological validity

Cons:
•reductionist= ignores personality differences, riecher & Haslam
•PPs deceived= Milgram

Question 5

Similarity and differences between individual and situational explanations

Answer 5

Similarity= collect both quantitative and qualitative data (thigpen&cleckley

Differences= individual relies on self report and unreliable (griffiths)
situational relies on experimental methods (Watt: funhaler, field experiment, 32 Australian children, repeated measures using funhaler+questionnaire)

Question 6

What is the definition of a dispositional explanation?

Answer 6

D= individuals are the ones who produce behaviour 
I= reductionist 
A= biological, developmental
M= lab experiments