With our growing understanding of social psychology, I wonder if we are seeing more conservative leaders intentionally exploiting the situationist/dispositionalist toggle. For example, a religious leader, by well crafted poor manners, can procure expected public criticism from the ‘intelligentsia’. The leader can then cry ‘religious persecution’ to whip up the conservative crowd; this covers the poor manners in the name of the typical situation of religious intolerance while also giving the leader a larger voice in the conservative community, and perhaps even national media.

Putting aside cases of dishonesty though, even if dispositionist interpretation of action is nothing more than narrative illusion, it would still seem to play a necessary role – we can’t do without it. As I think is intimated by many posts here, the point is not to determine whether an action should be objectively interpreted by either a dispositionist or situationist frame, but rather to choose the frame according to a moral-like principle: we need to find more disposition to our failures and others’ successes and more situation to our successes and others failures. This removes the selfish, self-protective mechanisms that allow for violence of all kinds on my view.

And I second Clark’s exhortation: keep up the good work!

Michael Metzler
858.414.7559
Cardiff By The Sea

Of course it isn’t just the situation that determines human behavior, but our genetically given capacities as expressed in the phenotype. It’s the complex interaction of internal and situational factors that ultimately explains why people act as they do. Liberals shouldn’t forget that people aren’t infinitely malleable, even as they fight the crucial fight of improving our situations to get the best out of ourselves, even Supreme Court justices.

Keep up the good work!

Tom Clark
Center for Naturalism