situational

• Situational factors affecting obedience - legitimacy

  • reducing the perceived legitimacy of the authority figure , through altering their mode of dress for example, can reduce obedience.
  • Reducing the prestige or status of the venue also leads to reductions in obedience
• situational factors affecting obedience - proximity

  • when the distance between the authority figure and the participant is increased, obedience reduces, as in the telephonic instruction variation
  • Latane (1981) used the term immediacy in social impact theory to refer to closeness of the target in terms of space and also time. Physical or psychological barriers to communication will affect immediacy
  • in one of milgram's variations, the learner was in the same room as the teacher. in this variation, removing the physical buffers led to obedience falling to 40%
• Situational factors affecting obedience - behaviour of others

  • exposure to role models who are disobedient decreases obedience
  • in one of milgram's variations, there were two further teachers who refused to carry on. In this experiment obedience dropped to 10% illustrating how the presence of others may affect obedience
• Strengths of situational factors affecting obedience

  • there is a lot of evidence that shows how legitimacy, proximity and the behaviour of others affect obedience
  • eg, meenus and raajimakers (1995) asked their participants to deliver increasingly unkind insults to a confederate who was applying for a job. More than 90% delivered all 15 insults in the baseline condition compared with 36% when the experimenter left the room and 16% when they had witnessed two rebellious indivicuals
  • this suggests that it is possible to reduce obedience significantly through adjusting aspects of a situation
• weaknesses of situational factors affecting obedience

  • in all of milgram's variations there were individual differences
  • some people refused to continue to higher shock levels despite situational pressure to obey
  • this shows that personality must be a key part of any explanation
• situational factors affecting obedience - application

  • research on situational factors and obedience has been applied to improve compliance with countryside rules
  • in the countryside there is no one to enforce the rules and therefore some people disobey, threatening wildlife and increasing risk of forest fires.
  • Gramann (1995) found that if information was provided about the reasons behind the rules, this increased the likelihood that participants felt they would obey
  • such signs provide immediacy, even when there is no authority figure there and they provide strength as they indicate the power that could potentially be brought to bear
  • this is important application of the work on situational factors and obedience which may help protect sites of natural beauty.