The situationist alternative
Perhaps the most radical suggestion is that nothing in the subjects’ personalities accounts for their compliance. The so-called situationist view holds that situational pressures, not personalities, account for human behavior.[455] Indeed, situationists argue that attributing behavior to personality is one of the fundamental delusions to which human beings are prey - it is, in their terminology, the “fundamental attribution error.” Situationists point out that small manipulations of Milgram’s experimental set-up are able to evoke huge swings in compliance behavior.
For example, in some experiments Milgram placed the teacher on a team with other “teachers,” who were actually actors working for Milgram. When the fellow teachers defied the experimenter, compliance plunged to 10 percent, but when they uncomplainingly delivered the shocks, compliance shot up to 90 percent. Obviously, variation like this arises from the situation, not from the subjects’ personalities. As a consequence, situationists argue that the only reliable predictor of how any given person will behave in a situation is the baseline rate for the entire population. The person’s observable character traits are by and large irrelevant.Situationism offers an important reminder that human character and will do not operate in a vacuum. The Achilles’ heel of situationism is explaining why anyone deviates from the majority behavior. If individual personality and idiosyncracy are largely irrelevant to subjects’ responses, we should find more or less uniform compliance behavior. In the Milgram experiments, situationists must explain why one-third of the subjects defy the experimenter. Remember that when audiences were asked whether they would comply in the Milgram experiment, 100 percent said no. What, if not individual personality and idiosyncracy, causes a one-third/two-thirds split when the situation changes from being an audience member filling out a questionnaire to performing in the actual experiment?
The situationists’ explanation is that even though people respond similarly to similar situations, different individuals perceive situations differently from one another.
Idiosyncracy operates at the level of perception and not at the level of behavior.On this theory, the defiant minority simply don’t perceive the experiment in the same way as the compliant majority.[456] Yet I find this explanation a little too convenient, particularly because there is no evidence to back it up - no independent study of how Milgram’s subjects perceived the experiment, and no attempt to correlate perception with response. Just what did the defiant subjects perceive in the experiment that their compliant brethren perceived differently? Without an answer to this question, and evidence to support it, it seems to me that the situationist explanation of individual differences fails, and with it the situationist explanation of Milgram compliance.21