“Situationist psychology,” as I understand it, doesn’t imply that the sitaution changes behavior because it changes us, and you don’t cite to any evidence to show this connection. Situationist psychology holds that behavior is determined by the immediate situation. If individual character is changed by association, then the fact remains that you are using character to predict behavior, not using the situation. In other words, you have created a kind of hybrid between situationist and presonality psychology, where personality does play a big role, but is subject to change in the immediate term (rather than in the long term, which is the usual personality position. But it is also different from the usual situationist position in that change in situation doesn’t determine behavior by changing a disposition. In your model, the situation is important because it determines dispositions. According to the situationist, a prison environment, for example, doesn’t create a mean character. Its tenets favor the prediction that prisoners return to old character, more or less immediately, if they return to the same situation as before their imprisonment.
You could take this point as carping, and it might be so classified were it the case that situationists have evidence that important dispositions do change (substantially) because of association. While I don’t have hard evidence either, it seems to me that both long-term, stable dispositions AND the immmediate situtation each determine more behavior than any intermediate-term dispositions. (Sometimes living among people whom you want want to be different from strengthens the opposed tendency to practice behavior that’s different from those surrounding you.)
The drug addict doesn’t want to change his disposition towards drug use; he wants to stop using drugs. Behavior begets character begets the person—lukeprog argues that you can change your behavior (and therefore yourself) by changing your situation.
The End of My Addiction is by a man who’s a cardiologist and was an alcoholic. He considers craving alcohol to be a problem in itself, and found that taking Baclofen (a muscle relaxant) caused him to not have the craving.
Only a little research has been done to test the usefulness of Baclofen for that purpose.
“Situationist psychology,” as I understand it, doesn’t imply that the sitaution changes behavior because it changes us, and you don’t cite to any evidence to show this connection. Situationist psychology holds that behavior is determined by the immediate situation. If individual character is changed by association, then the fact remains that you are using character to predict behavior, not using the situation. In other words, you have created a kind of hybrid between situationist and presonality psychology, where personality does play a big role, but is subject to change in the immediate term (rather than in the long term, which is the usual personality position. But it is also different from the usual situationist position in that change in situation doesn’t determine behavior by changing a disposition. In your model, the situation is important because it determines dispositions. According to the situationist, a prison environment, for example, doesn’t create a mean character. Its tenets favor the prediction that prisoners return to old character, more or less immediately, if they return to the same situation as before their imprisonment.
You could take this point as carping, and it might be so classified were it the case that situationists have evidence that important dispositions do change (substantially) because of association. While I don’t have hard evidence either, it seems to me that both long-term, stable dispositions AND the immmediate situtation each determine more behavior than any intermediate-term dispositions. (Sometimes living among people whom you want want to be different from strengthens the opposed tendency to practice behavior that’s different from those surrounding you.)
The drug addict doesn’t want to change his disposition towards drug use; he wants to stop using drugs. Behavior begets character begets the person—lukeprog argues that you can change your behavior (and therefore yourself) by changing your situation.
The End of My Addiction is by a man who’s a cardiologist and was an alcoholic. He considers craving alcohol to be a problem in itself, and found that taking Baclofen (a muscle relaxant) caused him to not have the craving.
Only a little research has been done to test the usefulness of Baclofen for that purpose.