The person versus Situation debate can be defined as the question of what determines someone 's behavior, personality or situation. This question has existed for nearly 50 years and the origin can be tracked down to a young American psychologist by the name of Walter Mischel when he challenged the belief that personality determines behavior, and proposed that situation was in fact the main determinate of how someone acts. Psychologists have been stumped on this question for years, but as more and more research comes out such as Stanley Milgram 's obedience experiments or zimbardo 's prison experiments and other scholarly reports, it has become more apparent that the situation may dominate personality when it comes to someone 's behavior.
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I believe that the situational argument is much more concrete and I will demonstrate why in the body of this paper.
Extensive research has been done to prove that the situation almost always determines behavior. My first research example is Stanley Milgram 's obedience studies. The Milgram experiments were conducted in 1963 at Yale University by an American psychologist named Stanley Milgram. Milgram created this experiment to demonstrate a person 's willingness to conform and abandon their personality and beliefs based on their situation/environment. He started out by interviewing the participants to ensure that they were normal average people who had no criminal or violent history. He then told each participant that they would act as a teacher for a person behind a wall that they could not see but only hear. They were told that they should ask a series of questions, and every time the student would answer the question …show more content…
By the end of the experiment the conclusions went as follows: 65% of participants administered the 450 volts even though it was labeled as deadly, and 100% of participants at least administered 300 volts even though it was labeled as dangerous. These conclusions demonstrated that even though the participants were identified as normal people who were not violent they still harmed another person without batting an eye just because there was a power figure urging them to continue. Later these participants were interviewed and they were disgusted that they felt no guilt while they were carrying out the experiment, and the majority were surprised that they were so quick to conform and abandon their morals just because of the situation/environment. The Next experiment that I would like to talk about is known as the Stanford Prison Experiment which was conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971 at Stanford University. The Stanford Prison Experiment was an experiment similar to Milgram 's that aimed to prove behavior is
I believe that the situational argument is much more concrete and I will demonstrate why in the body of this paper.
Extensive research has been done to prove that the situation almost always determines behavior. My first research example is Stanley Milgram 's obedience studies. The Milgram experiments were conducted in 1963 at Yale University by an American psychologist named Stanley Milgram. Milgram created this experiment to demonstrate a person 's willingness to conform and abandon their personality and beliefs based on their situation/environment. He started out by interviewing the participants to ensure that they were normal average people who had no criminal or violent history. He then told each participant that they would act as a teacher for a person behind a wall that they could not see but only hear. They were told that they should ask a series of questions, and every time the student would answer the question …show more content…
By the end of the experiment the conclusions went as follows: 65% of participants administered the 450 volts even though it was labeled as deadly, and 100% of participants at least administered 300 volts even though it was labeled as dangerous. These conclusions demonstrated that even though the participants were identified as normal people who were not violent they still harmed another person without batting an eye just because there was a power figure urging them to continue. Later these participants were interviewed and they were disgusted that they felt no guilt while they were carrying out the experiment, and the majority were surprised that they were so quick to conform and abandon their morals just because of the situation/environment. The Next experiment that I would like to talk about is known as the Stanford Prison Experiment which was conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971 at Stanford University. The Stanford Prison Experiment was an experiment similar to Milgram 's that aimed to prove behavior is