Evaluate

• Themes focusing on situational factors suggest our behaviours are simply determined by what is happening around us and that we do not resist this


  it does not take into account our capacity to think and use our free will to make a conscious decision as to whether we will conform following the crowd, act pro or anti-socially or obey.
• Deindividuation does not always lead to violence


  crowds do not necessarily become mindless and violent and actually deindividuation could be a positive experience. People can feel themselves as part of the crowd, losing their sense of individual self but in a good way as they are simply enjoying the atmosphere such as at a music festival. It can also lead to pro-social behaviour
• Not everyone conforms in the same way

  psychologists often generalise their results to all cultures. However, some psychologists have found that people in individualist cultures are less likely to conform than those people in collectivist cultures.
• If research only focuses on one area, then it may not give a valid representation of people’s behaviour


  people may conform in some situations but not others. This makes it hard to predict how they will behave. A student may conform to fit in at a new school, but may not conform in a drama group they have attended for 7 years, because they feel more confident.
• The theories are reductionist in that they fail to take into account individual differences


  people may be more willing to obey because they have a particular type of personality, rather than simply the situation that they find themselves in.
• Milgram’s results on obedience can be viewed as deterministic


  people obeyed in his research study because of the situation that they found themselves in and had little free will over their behaviour. However, not everyone obeyed and it could be argued these people exercised their free will not obey and perhaps it was something to do with their personality that enabled them to disobey the experimenter.
• Many people have a problem with Milgram’s theory because it would suggest the people who commit atrocious acts are not responsible for their actions and therefore should not be held accountable for them


  Milgram’s theory suggests that people are not responsible for what they do when acting on orders of a higher authority.
• Too much of the research into cultural differences in pro-social behaviour is conducted on children


  however as adults they may act in a very different way and it could just be that children’s pro-social behaviour develops at different times in different cultures.
• The situational theories do not explain why some people do not obey


  the situational argument is determinist because it assumes that anyone, given the right situation, would obey. However, it fails to explain why some people in the Milgram electric shock experiment refused to obey the orders of the experimenter.