Situationalism v. dispositionism

 

We must attain, interrogate, critique, and transform measures of attitude, perception, and belief, revealing conclusions about the nature of what someone knows.

So I want to show you a modified Venn diagram — modified by me, so please be patient — and which describes two aspects of social psychology that influence policy, behavior, and belief through structures of law and the way we approach thinking about questions involving human disputes within institutional structures; so you can see that, roughly dividing this category of looking at people and their relationship to larger systems and how those systems in turn see people into two camps, you have situationalism, which means people‘s social context shapes choices, and you have dispositionism which basically pre-judges people on social characteristics leading to the notion that someone can be at fault for who they are. Of course, there’s some fuzzy areas in the middle. For instance, you can say that context and sense of self shape choices, and you can say context shapes character, but these continue to be relatively different even though they’re within the sphere of similarity, different from each other, and that is, and in turn, different from the areas with no overlap. The idea of situationalism leads to the understanding that there are situations that we cannot accept, just as dispositionism leads to dispositions being objected to on the basis of being themselves.  All this leads to the ultimate imperative, which is that there’s a duty to oppose unconscionable situations.