The modern American ethos favors the view that people have tremendous power to change their own lives. We tend to think of ourselves as fundamentally independent of each other. We cheer on film and literary heroes who triumph over adverse circumstances by guile, wit and perseverance. We think that by merely changing your disposition, by changing your personality, you can change anything.
While being able to affect one’s own disposition is indeed a valuable ability, we assign far too little weight to the effect of circumstances totally beyond the control of any one individual in shaping individual lives. We give credit to disposition where we should be giving credit to situation. We discount the complex dynamics of our circumstances because they seem like too much to think about. Maybe also because we’re used to spending 99% of our time thinking about ourselves, and most of our circumstances seem to be about things other than ourselves, if they’re “about” anything.
From the “About The Situationist” page at The Situationist blog:
There is a dominant conception of the human animal as a rational, or at least reasonable, preference-driven chooser, whose behavior reflects preferences, moderated by information processing and will, but little else. Laws, policies, and the most influential legal theories are premised on that same conception. Social psychology and related fields have discovered countless ways in which that conception is wrong. “The situation” refers to causally significant features around us and within us that we do not notice or believe are irrelevant in explaining human behavior.
(This is not meant to be a political post — I first drafted it way back in January — but you can see both U.S. presidential campaigns crafting storylines around this notion.)
Leave a comment