Explanations of Independent Behaviour

Locus of control has many supporting studies. For instance, Avtgis carried out a meta-analysis which looked at locus of control. They found that those who scored higher on external locus of control were more easily persuaded. However, Williams and Warchal studied university students using tasks based on Asch’s experiments; they found that assertion may be more important that locus on control.  Furthermore, Rotter’s Locus of control is only a scale where people self-reported a list events. Therefore, there Is a high risk that there is demand characteristics which means the findings are unreliable and therefore cannot be generalised.  

Another explanation is personality characteristics. Oliner and Oliner set out to investigate the personality characteristics of those individuals who have been found to be disobedient to authority. They used an interview method to study two groups of non-Jewish people who had lived through the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. They compared 406 people who had protected and rescued Jews with 126 who had not done this. They found that the rescuers scored higher on measures of social responsibility and had scored demonstrating internal locus of control.

Milgram et al did a follow up study. In agreement with Oliner and Oliner they found that disobedient participants scored higher on the social responsibility scale and demonstrated internal locus of control. This is supporting study and from this it was concluded that social responsibility and locus of control where important factors. However, the study was only done with non-Jewish people in the time of the Holocaust. Therefore it can be hard to generalise the findings because other cultures may act differently at these types of events. Lastly, the use of the interview technique to gain information may not be effective. This is because the participant may have social desirability and therefore results will be invalid and will be hard to generalise.