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Situational And Dispositional Factors Essay

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Describe the role of situational and dispositional factors in explaining behavior
The roles of situational and dispositional factors in explaining behavior could be explained using the attribution theory where attribution is the process of interpreting and explaining behavior and how people try to use these factors to do this . Situational factors refer to external influences such as who you surround yourself with, social norms, the situation and the weather while dispositional factors are about internal factors such as your personality, attitude and beliefs .
In explaining behavior these factors can either be combined as one explanation or used separately to determine the cause of one’s actions. For example, one study testing the situational role in affecting behavior was done by Philip Zimbardo (1971) in the Stanford Prison Experiment where 22 males were selected depending on their social skills and mental …show more content…

The study does not show if females act in the same way and conform hence or if this dispositional factor to behavior only applies to men.
A limitation with both studies is also that situational and dispositional factors often go hand in hand as factors of why people behave as they do and neither of these researches take this into account.
In conclusion, situational and dispositional factors explain behavior through the impact of the environment, situation, social surroundings and mood, personal traits and opinions, respectively. This has been shown through the prison research where the participants changed their behavior drastically due to the environment and in the conformity experiment where the individual changed their behavior in accordance to the larger group due to their belief that they had to fit in. However, both factors could work simultaneously as causes of one’s

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