Final answer:
Most male students attributed the behavior of a woman acting friendly or unfriendly to both the instructed situation and her personal disposition, showcasing an understanding of the interaction between situational and dispositional factors on behavior.
Step-by-step explanation:
When male students in an experiment were told that a woman to whom they would be speaking had been instructed to act in a friendly or unfriendly way, most of them subsequently attributed her behavior to B) the situation and her personal disposition. This question relates to the concept of attribution, where people try to determine the causes behind others' behavior.
In social psychology, this is often examined through the lens of situational and dispositional influences on behavior. There is a tendency known as the fundamental attribution error, where people overemphasize personality traits and underemphasize situational factors in explaining others' behavior. However, when explaining our own behavior, we have more information and tend to use situational explanations due to actor-observer bias.