Philosophizing and politicizing psychology

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Dr. Philip Zimbardo is a psychologist whose life's work has been devoted to studying evil behaviour, especially in those who had previously exhibited no tendency towards it. He (and most other psychologists) describe behaviour as a function of personality and environment. Those who place more importance on personality, genetics, etc, are called dispositionalists; those, like him, who tend towards environment as the deciding factor in most decisions are called situationalists.

In a nutshell, his research suggests that most people are capable of great evil if they are put in a situation that encourages them to divorce themselves from what they are doing while simultaneously dehumanizing those who are under their control; for example, if you give someone a military-type haircut and uniform so they don't see the person in the mirror as themselves, then give them control over prisoners who have been disparaged in their hearing, most people will do one of two things: they will either actively abuse the prisoners, or they will retreat into whatever bureaucracy exists to support the scenario, thereby facilitating the abuse of others. Whistle-blowers, in this model, are not doing what any reasonable person would do; they're true heroes.

But this isn't what I actually wanted to discuss, fascinating and disturbing as it is. Dr. Zimbardo points out an interesting fact about people who view the world in dispositional vs. situational terms. He says that the rich and powerful are probably going to be dispositionalists, because it allows them to give credit for their success to their own personality, hard work, etc. On the other hand, those who live with poverty are much more likely to be situationalists, because they want to be able to say, "But that wasn't really his fault; it was the fault of X environmental factor."

I think most of us unconsciously choose one viewpoint over the other as a defining part of our worldviews, and that this choice is fairly easy to see in political leanings. Loosely, conservative viewpoints tend to be more dispositionalist while left-leaning ones are more situationalist. Case in point: a while ago, there was someone on my friends list who described herself as a libertarian (and she gave other libertarians a bad name.) She was against pretty much any government-run social program. She had pulled herself up by the bootstraps and succeeded, and anyone who hadn't done the same was obviously not working hard enough. She made no allowances for situations where hard work wasn't enough or was sabotaged by someone else - which ulimately led to the end of our association. She was a dispositionalist to an extreme degree. What she didn't seem to realize was that her situation had as much to do with good luck and good positioning as it did with her own hard work. Her mother was rich enough to buy her an Audi as a gift, out of the blue. Her education was paid for, but not by her. She had lucked out in the brains and family-wealth departments, if not in personality. (sorry - /cattiness.) Now, I wouldn't begrudge that, except that she then used her dispositionalist leanings to blame poverty on the poor, and refuse to help them because they clearly weren't working hard enough to deserve it. (This is dovetailing nicely into my occasional rants against the Myth of the Deserving Poor, isn't it?)

It won't come as a surprise to any of you, I think, that I'm more of a situationalist. A large part of my job is creating situations where learning is optimized and distractions minimized.

I will come back to this post later; stay tuned for updates.

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[lee-in-limbo.livejournal.com]

And there are some nasty typos in there. Many apologies.

Lee.