Dispositional Factors of Crowd & Collective Behaviour (AQA GCSE Psychology)

• A dispositional explanation is one which focuses on the role of personality in behaviour
• Personality includes:
  • Traits
  • Characteristics 
  • Attributes 
  • Qualities
  • Idiosyncrasies

• It is the traits etc. which set one person apart from everyone else i.e. everyone has a unique personality
• There is no absolute way that people respond to being in a crowd
  • Some people will become quieter
  • Others will become more excitable
• Locus of control (LOC) is a dispositional explanation of conformity (see the revision note on this here) which applies equally to crowd and collective behaviour
• People who have an internal LOC:
  • Take responsibility for their actions
  • Do not blame others/circumstances for what happens to them
  • Are less likely to be swayed by group pressure
• People who have an external LOC:
  • Do not take responsibility for their actions
  • Are more inclined to blame others/circumstances for what happens to them
  • Are more likely to go along with the group
• Chiu (2003) conducted research on whistleblowing:
  • 306 Chinese managers and professionals comprised the sample
  • Each participant was asked questions to determine their LOC (internal or external)
  • Each participant was asked about their intention to whistleblow if circumstances required it
  • The results showed that participants with an internal LOC were more likely to blow the whistle than participants with an external LOC

An internal LOC means that someone is more likely to speak out and go against the crowd.

• Morality refers to what an individual believes is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’
• An individual’s morality may operate outside of what the law/society/religion deems to be right or wrong for example:
  • An animal rights activist may feel that it is morally right to smash up labs which carry out animal testing
  • A school student may feel that their school is morally wrong to insist on students wearing uniform
  • Someone may decide not to vote as they feel that all political parties are immoral and corrupt
• People who have very strong moral values are unlikely to be swayed by public opinion or crowd behaviour
  • They are firm and resolute in their beliefs and convictions
• Examples of people who have gone against the crowd to stand up for their moral beliefs include:
  • Rosa Parks who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Alabama in the 1950s
  • Ghandi who led non-violent protests in his fight for Indian independence
  • ‘Tank Man’ who temporarily stopped the advance of tanks in Beijing in 1989, which had been sent in to break up a student protest

Evaluation of dispositional factors of crowd & collective behaviour

Strengths

• Examples from history (see above) validate the argument that morality is a strong dispositional factor in resisting collective behaviour
• Locus of control can also be applied to other forms of social behaviour e.g. conformity and obedience which means that it can be tested for reliability across behaviours

Weaknesses

• Bocchiaro et al. (2012) found that whistle-blowing amongst a sample of employees did not show real personality differences which weakens the dispositional argument
• Morality can be measured using self-reports (e.g. questionnaires) but a weakness of this method is that people may say that they would act morally but they may act differently (i.e. immorally)