Situational Influences on Behaviour

How circumstances influence behaviour

A situational factor is an external feature of someone’s circumstances that influences how they act. Other people, the expectations of a culture and the presence of an authority figure can all affect behaviour. A situational explanation asks what is happening around the person, rather than explaining their actions only through personality.

This helps explain why the same person might behave differently alone, among friends or under a teacher’s supervision. The important question is not simply whether other people are present, but how their presence creates pressure, expectations or a sense of responsibility.

Majority influence: fitting in or changing your mind

Conformity means changing behaviour or beliefs to match a group. Majority influence occurs when the views or actions of a larger group exert pressure on an individual.

There are two important ways this can happen. In compliance, someone goes along with the group publicly but privately disagrees. The situation creates a desire for approval or a fear of rejection. In internalisation, the person genuinely accepts the group’s position: their private opinion changes as well as their public behaviour.

For example, someone might dress like their friends simply to fit in, despite disliking the clothes. That would be compliance. If they come to genuinely believe that the style looks good, it would be internalisation.

Asch’s 1951 line-comparison research demonstrates the power of majority pressure. Participants sometimes gave the same clearly incorrect answer as the majority. Going along with an answer they did not privately accept illustrates compliance to avoid the group’s disapproval.

This supports a situational explanation because the group can influence even a straightforward judgement. However, conformity is not inevitable: people can maintain their own answer. Majority pressure therefore helps explain conformity without completely determining everyone’s response.

Crowds, anonymity and deindividuation

Collective behaviour involves people acting together; crowd behaviour occurs within a gathering of people. A crowd can change how identifiable and accountable an individual feels.

Le Bon (1895) argued that individuals become anonymous within a crowd and take on its collective mentality. Deindividuation describes reduced awareness of oneself as an individual and reduced concern about being personally evaluated or held responsible.

The proposed sequence is that anonymity reduces self-evaluation and concern about consequences. Normal inhibitions then weaken, making anti-social behaviour more likely. For example, someone hidden within a large crowd may feel less identifiable and become more willing to damage property than they would alone. The explanation concerns the crowd situation, not an assumption that the person is always aggressive.

However, a crowd does not necessarily remove all control or produce harm. People can also cooperate and help others. This limits explanations that treat crowd behaviour as automatically destructive: what the group is doing and which behaviour it encourages also matter.

Culture shapes expectations about helping and harming

Culture consists of shared values, beliefs and practices. It influences which actions are encouraged, expected or disapproved of.

Nobles (1976) proposed that individualist cultures, which emphasise personal goals and independence, encourage relatively less pro-social behaviour and more anti-social behaviour. Collectivist cultures emphasise group and community needs, so cooperation, sharing and helping may receive greater encouragement. These are proposed cultural tendencies, not descriptions of every person within a society.

Whiting and Whiting (1975) studied 134 children aged 3–10 across six cultures. Children in less industrialised cultures showed more altruistic behaviour. This supports the suggestion that social environments organised around cooperation can encourage helping. However, a study of children cannot automatically establish how all adults behave, and being less industrialised is not itself the same thing as being collectivist.

Nobles also contrasted reports of hospitality towards strangers in Native American communities with reports of stealing, deception and violence among the Ik, an African mountain community. The latter behaviour was interpreted in terms of individual survival. These historical accounts challenge the idea that all non-Western communities necessarily behave alike; they should not be treated as fixed characteristics of every member of either group.

A balanced conclusion is that cultural expectations can encourage pro-social or anti-social behaviour, but broad cultural labels do not reliably predict an individual’s actions. Circumstances and differences within cultures also matter.

Authority, legitimacy and responsibility

Obedience means following an authority figure’s instructions. People are more likely to obey when they believe the person has legitimate authority: a recognised right to give orders in that setting. A uniform can signal this status, while a respected institution can make the authority appear credible.

In Milgram’s 1963 research, participants believed they were giving electric shocks to a learner under an experimenter’s supervision. 65% continued to the maximum setting of 450 volts. The shocks were simulated; the learner was not actually electrocuted.

The university setting and the experimenter’s white coat helped establish apparent legitimacy. Milgram also argued that accepting the experimenter’s responsibility encouraged an agentic state. In this state, a person sees themselves as carrying out someone else’s wishes rather than acting independently and accepting responsibility for the consequences. This can make obedience easier even when an instruction conflicts with personal judgement.

Bickman (1974) also found that a uniform signalling legitimate social power increased obedience. This supports the idea that a visible feature of the situation can affect whether an instruction is followed.

Do situations determine our actions?

Situational explanations can be criticised through the free will–determinism debate. A strongly deterministic explanation suggests that social circumstances cause people to conform, follow a crowd or obey, leaving no meaningful choice.

The strength of this approach is that it explains how powerful social pressures can be. Asch and Milgram showed that ordinary people sometimes acted against their own judgement when faced with a majority or an authority figure.

The limitation is that people do not all respond alike. In Milgram’s study, 35% did not continue to the maximum shock setting. Resistance is consistent with the argument that people can exercise free will, although differences in responses do not by themselves prove that choices are entirely free of other influences.

Situational explanations can also be too narrow if they overlook personal values, morality and personality. The most defensible conclusion is that situations strongly influence the likelihood of behaviour, but do not make conformity, aggression or obedience unavoidable.

Majority influence

• Compliance: public agreement, private disagreement; approval or avoidance of rejection.
• Internalisation: genuine acceptance, publicly and privately.
• Asch (1951): incorrect line judgements show majority pressure; resistance shows conformity is not inevitable.

Crowd behaviour

• Le Bon (1895): anonymity in a crowd → deindividuation → reduced self-evaluation and accountability → weaker inhibitions.