Dispositional Factors in Social Influence
Dispositional Factors in Social Influence
The last lesson looked at situational factors — things outside a person, like a uniform or the size of a crowd, that push people towards conformity, obedience or crowd behaviour. But not everyone responds to the same situation in the same way. A dispositional factor is a stable feature of someone’s personality that shapes how they respond, regardless of the situation. Four dispositional factors appear across the topics in social influence: self-esteem, locus of control, morality and the authoritarian personality.
Four dispositional factors are studied in social influence: self-esteem affects conformity, locus of control affects behaviour in crowds, morality affects pro-social and antisocial behaviour, and the authoritarian personality affects obedience.
Self-Esteem and Conformity
Self-esteem affects how likely someone is to conform to a majority. A person with low self-esteem doubts their own judgement and looks to others for reassurance, making them more likely to go along with the majority even when they privately disagree. A person with high self-esteem trusts their own opinion and is more confident resisting group pressure. Brain research links self-esteem to hippocampal volume — studies have found that people with lower self-esteem tend to have reduced hippocampal volume, since the hippocampus plays a role in emotional regulation and how people process memories about themselves.
Locus of Control in Crowds
Locus of control affects how people behave once they are part of a crowd. Someone with an internal locus of control believes their own actions and choices determine what happens to them. This makes them more likely to act independently within a crowd, resisting the pull to join in when a group is stealing or damaging property. Someone with an external locus of control believes outcomes are shaped by luck, fate or other people. This makes them more likely to follow the crowd’s lead, since they feel less personal responsibility for the outcome anyway.
Morality and Pro-Social or Antisocial Behaviour
Morality — a person’s own standards of right and wrong — explains why some individuals resist antisocial crowd behaviour while others join in. Someone with strong moral reasoning is more likely to act pro-socially, for example stepping in to help a victim, even when the crowd around them is behaving destructively. Morality has been linked to specific regions of the pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in decision-making, impulse control and weighing up the consequences of an action. Differences in how active these regions are may help explain why moral reasoning — and resistance to antisocial pressure — varies between individuals.
The specification embeds brain and neuropsychology content within each topic, and it can be tested on its own. For dispositional factors in social influence, two structures matter most: hippocampal volume, linked to self-esteem, and regions of the pre-frontal cortex, linked to morality.
These are examples of how biological differences between individuals can help explain why personality traits vary. A smaller hippocampus is associated with lower self-esteem; differences in pre-frontal cortex activity are associated with differences in moral reasoning and impulse control. Remember: this content can appear as a standalone question, separate from the wider theory it supports.
Authoritarian Personality and Obedience
The authoritarian personality describes someone who rigidly follows conventional values, shows strong respect for authority figures and finds ambiguous situations uncomfortable. People with this personality type are more likely to obey orders from an authority figure without question, even when the order is harmful, because challenging authority conflicts with their core values. This dispositional factor helps explain why obedience rates differ between individuals placed in the same situation.
Low self-esteem and an external locus of control make a person more susceptible to social influence, while an authoritarian personality increases obedience specifically. Strong personal morality can override crowd pressure and lead to pro-social rather than antisocial behaviour.
Research Study: NatCen (2011) — The August Riots
NatCen Social Research (Morrell et al., 2011) studied anti-social collective behaviour and dispositional factors using the riots that broke out across England in August 2011, drawing on interviews with young people across several riot-affected areas of England.
Background: In August 2011, disorder broke out in Tottenham after a protest outside the local police station escalated into looting, arson and violence, before spreading to other English cities. NatCen (2011) investigated why some young people became involved in this anti-social collective behaviour.
Method: The study used a qualitative design, based on in-depth interviews with young people connected to the affected areas, including some who took part in the disorder. The interviews explored participants’ personal backgrounds, attitudes towards the police and their own account of events on the night, allowing researchers to compare situational and dispositional reasons for involvement.
Results: Participants gave a mix of situational reasons for joining in, such as the breakdown of policing and the excitement of the crowd, and dispositional reasons, such as existing resentment towards authority and a sense of having little to lose. Crucially, not every young person in the affected area took part — many chose to stay away, pointing to individual differences in personality and morality.
Conclusions: Anti-social collective behaviour during the riots resulted from an interaction between situational triggers and dispositional factors, rather than the situation alone determining behaviour.
Criticisms: Because interviews relied on people describing and justifying their own behaviour after the events, responses may be affected by social desirability bias. The qualitative approach produced rich detail but drew on a relatively small, geographically concentrated sample, which raises questions about generalisability.
Evaluating Dispositional Explanations
A strength of dispositional explanations is that they explain why individuals in the exact same situation — the same crowd, the same authority figure — behave differently. Situational explanations alone cannot account for this variation. A weakness is generalisability: studies like NatCen (2011) draw on specific events and small samples, so findings about why those particular young people took part in the 2011 riots may not apply to collective behaviour in a different city, culture or decade.
The most complete explanation of social influence combines both perspectives: the situational factors covered in the last lesson (uniform, group size, culture) create the conditions for conformity, obedience or crowd behaviour, while dispositional factors — self-esteem, locus of control, morality and the authoritarian personality — determine how any one individual responds within those conditions.