Question

It has been argued that obedience studies, like those of Milgram, demonstrate how we typically underestimate the power of situational forces when explaining others’ behaviour. Discuss.

Answer 1

• Nisbett attempts to explain the fundamental attribution error, the supposed tendency to attribute people’s behavior to their internal dispositions rather than their external circumstances.
• He then goes on to make some very old arguments that behavior is not as consistent with personality as most people think, and uses the famous Milgram obedience experiments as an example that supposedly illustrates that people overestimate the influence of personality dispositions on behavior and underestimate the power of the situation to control how people act.
• Deciding to do what an experimenter tells you to do has a dispositional component as much as a situational one – the desire to please an authority figure.
• The idea that situations and dispositions are opposing forces in determining behavior reflects a false dichotomy, because the two are complementary. A situation can only elicit a response if a person has a disposition to respond in the relevant way. Hence, what these types of experiments show, is not that people overestimate dispositional causes and underestimate situational ones, but that people overestimate some causes (e.g. how they would like to behave) and underestimate others (e.g. their willingness to do things that make them uncomfortable to avoid awkward confrontations).
• That is, people might underestimate how conflicted their own dispositions are, and experimental situations can bring these awkward conflicts to light and expose how much people struggle to find compromises between them.
• This conflict-based view is also useful for understanding Milgram’s obedience experiments, which Nisbett uses as his go-to example of people’s supposed preference for dispositional explanations over situational ones. He alludes to the fact that when people hear about the results of this famous experiment they find it hard to believe that they or someone like them might behave the same way as about two-thirds of people did in the most widely reported version of this study.
• An alternative explanation is that people do not appreciate their disposition to obey because they overestimate how much personal importance they place on behaving morally. That is, features of the situation in this experiment affect behavior because of people’s corresponding dispositions.
• This does not mean that situations are more important than personality, only that the two interact in ways that people do not always understand. Milgram himself actually thought that obedience reflected a complex mix of personality and situational factors, something that is often overlooked.