Situation over disposition: is character a weaker predictor of conduct than circumstance?

Stanley Milgram, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Often it is not the kind of person a man is but the kind of situation he is in that determines how he will act.¹ This is the lesson of the century's social psychology, and it is the one people resist hardest.²

Sources

1. And it reveals a deep cultural tendency to view acts as flowing from an enduring trait of the person, rather than emerging through the interaction of the person with the environment. Yet social psychology has clearly established that often it is not so much the kind of person one is, but the kind of situation one is in, that determines our actions.

   The Individual in a Social World, Essays and Experiments, p. 214

2. They further predicted that by the twentieth shock level (300 volts; the victim refuses to answer) 3.73 percent of the subjects would still be obedient; and that only a little over onetenth of one percent of the subjects would administer the highest shock on the board. But, as the graph indicates, the obtained behavior was very different. Sixty-two percent of the subjects obeyed the experimenter's commands fully.

   The Individual in a Social World, Essays and Experiments, pp. 176–177

Where the argument is made

• The Epilogue to Obedience to Authority (1974)
• the introductions to The Individual in a Social World (Blass ed., 2010)
• The Experience of Living in Cities (Science, 1970)

How the argument was received

Widely adopted and widely qualified; the strong form is now a minority position.